Fix: User script import now respects script_dir

[tezheng]

Prefer find_spec for user script imports; fallback to spec_from_file_location if not found.

Describe your changes

The original implementation of import_module_from_file incorrectly
checked for the existence of user scripts in the current working
directory (cwd), regardless of the script_dir argument provided in import_user_module.

This PR corrects this behavior by implementing the following logic:

1. Attempt to locate the module using importlib.util.find_spec.
2. Fallback to using importlib.util.spec_from_file_location if find_spec fails

Checklist before requesting a review

• Add unit tests for this change.
• Make sure all tests can pass.
• Update documents if necessary.
• Lint and apply fixes to your code by running lintrunner -a
• Is this a user-facing change? If yes, give a description of this change to be included in the release notes.
• Is this PR including examples changes? If yes, please remember to update example documentation in a follow-up PR.

(Optional) Issue link

#1540

[tezheng]

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[jambayk]

could you provide an example scenario where the current implementation doesn't work?

It was a design decision that the user_script location is independent of the script_dir location so the path to user_script must be absolute or relative to current dir (i.e. wherever the olive command is called from, not the config.json's parent dir) for it to get resolved correctly. Our examples might have the user_script inside script_dir but it is not a requirement.
The only relation between script_dir and user_script is that since script_dir is added to sys.path, user_script can import modules under script_dir directly.

[tezheng]

could you provide an example scenario where the current implementation doesn't work?

See below

It was a design decision that the user_script location is independent of the script_dir location so the path to user_script must be absolute or relative to current dir (i.e. wherever the olive command is called from, not the config.json's parent dir) for it to get resolved correctly.

By "design" you mean this doc, right? Custom Script

Our examples might have the user_script inside script_dir but it is not a requirement. The only relation between script_dir and user_script is that since script_dir is added to sys.path, user_script can import modules under script_dir directly.

This is the origin implementation

def import_module_from_file(module_path: Union[Path, str], module_name: Optional[str] = None):
    module_path = Path(module_path).resolve()
    if not module_path.exists():
        raise ValueError(f"{module_path} doesn't exist")
    ...

It seems this implementation specifically requires module_path (aka user_script) either an absolute path or locates in cwd, regardless of script_dir.

For example, a project structured like

- my_project
  - my_modules
    - file.py
  - model_a
    - workflow.json

workflow.json

{
  "user_script": "file.py",
  "script_dir": "my_modules",
}

Executing below commands will cause ValueError(f"{module_path} doesn't exist"), since cwd is my_project but file.py isn't in the project folder.

cd my_project
olive run --config ./model_a/workflow.json

[tezheng]

What's more, IMHO, I think maybe Path(workflow.json).parent should be always insert into sys.path, since user_script normally will be shipped alongside workflow.json, and its path is usually relative to workflow.json.

Do you think this makes any sense? @jambayk

[jambayk]

@tezheng commenting on this file so we can have a thread.

Your proposal for allowing user_script paths relative to the directory containing the config json makes a lot of sense. It would help a lot with the portability of olive projects.
However, apart from user_scripts, we also have many other resources like data dirs, script dirs, etc that have the same issue. Workflows can also be run on remote systems such as docker and azureml, both of which require resolvable paths for mounting. Due to this, we originally decided on paths that are absolute or relative to current dir so that every resource is resolvable and independent of one another.

After a discussion with the team, we agree that allowing paths to be relative to the working directory (directory containing config json) should also be supported. I have created a work item for this, and we can discuss offline on teams with you about the priority of this feature. This would require a more involved update of the entire codebase so that all resources have the same behavior (+ not have user script be a special case) and don't break compatibility with remote systems.

FYI this is how we infer resource types. This would need to be updated to check for paths relative to the working dir. There are also other Path.resolve() instances throughout the codebase that we would need to updated accordingly.