[RFC] Make the TorchData Library Standalone from PyTorch Core Library

🚀 The feature

Note that this is a request for comment; currently, there is no plan to make TorchData a standalone library. We would like to solicit feedback from the community.

Proposal: Make the TorchData library standalone with little to no dependency on the PyTorch Core library (i.e. torch).

Motivation, pitch

An argument for a standalone library is that, it will allow users to use all the data loading functionalities in this library without installing/using PyTorch. Datasets implemented using TorchData may become usable by other frameworks.

An argument against this change is - in order to certain DataLoader functionalities backward compatible with DataPipes, the torch library may need to become dependent on TorchData instead.

The list of arguments here is not comprehensive, feel free to leave a comment about potential use cases and how they will be impacted.

Alternatives

Leave the library as it is with dependency on torch.

Additional context

Please feel free to leave any comment/reaction to this proposal whether you are for or against this change. We’d like to hear from you!

cc: @VitalyFedyunin @ejguan @NivekT

[abhi-mosaic]

I’m working on a downstream library (Composer) that has the exact same issue – we would love to allow users to build datasets with torchdata without hard requirements on the torch version.

[ejguan]

Just for record, when decoupled, expecttest can be removed from our test dependency.