ilab 0.17.2 released to ease confusion around Python support

[Nathan Weinberg]

Hello InstructLab users,

The Maintainer teams have recently fielded a lot of questions around InstructLab 0.17.1, which is an unsupported release. We are seeing a lot of usage of this version as it was the last Y-stream we shipped at supported Python 3.9 and Python 3.12. Python 3.9 support will likely never be returning to InstructLab - we are hoping to reintroduce Python 3.12 support in the near future.

The CLI Maintainer has just cut a 0.17.2 release for ilab which adds a deprecation notice to the help and config commands to try and better communicate this change. The text of the notice is as follows:

ilab no longer supports Python 3.9 or Python 3.12 as of version 0.18. If you are using either of these Python versions, there is no upgrade path from ilab 0.17 to newer ilab versions.
Please switch to Python 3.10 or 3.11 to use the latest ilab. ilab 0.17 will receive no bug fixes or additional features.
You can check which Python version you are using by running `python --version`

If you find yourself using Python 3.9 or 3.12, please reinstall ilab in a new virtual environment using either Python 3.11 (preferred) or Python 3.10. The version of ilab that is installed in this env should be the latest version, which is 0.20.1 at the time of this writing.

Thanks and happy instructing!

Nathan

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Nathan Weinberg

Senior Software Engineer

AI Engineering | InstructLab & Granite