Consider making GUI dependencies optional to support CLI-only packaging

[PlushZ]

Hi,

I am working on a Galaxy tool wrapper for CountESS, where Galaxy would run existing CountESS .ini workflows through countess_cmd.

For this use case, Galaxy only needs the command-line interface and workflow execution. The GUI is not used.

While preparing a Bioconda recipe for CountESS, I noticed that the current base package depends on GUI-related packages:

• tkinterweb
• ttkthemes

These packages are not available from the standard conda-forge/bioconda channels, which makes it difficult to package CountESS for Bioconda and therefore difficult to use it as a Galaxy dependency.

Would you consider moving GUI-only dependencies into an optional extra, for example:

[project.dependencies]
# core CLI/runtime dependencies only

[project.optional-dependencies]
gui = [
    "tkinterweb~=3.23.5",
    "ttkthemes~=3.2.2",
]

Or do you have another ideas?
Thanks for any answer.

Best,
Polina

[nickzoic]

Yeah, I can't see any harm in making those optional: ttkthemes is already optional to support (it just makes the window decorations look a little more 'normal') and tkinterweb is really only used to display the help information.

My only concern is that requiring people to pip install countess[gui] adds a small degree of confusion but I could work around that by just having countess_gui print a reminder on startup.

I'll have a look at this tomorrow ...

[nickzoic]

Okay, see branch nick/57-make-gui-optional ... let me know if this works okay for you?

It's only a branch but you should be able to install it with pip install git+https://github.com/CountESS-Project/CountESS.git@nick/57-make-gui-optional or by putting that URL in your requirements.txt or whatever.

[PlushZ]

Thanks a lot! I tested the branch in a clean env without tkinterweb or ttkthemes. This should solve the Galaxy/Bioconda CLI use case.

The only remaining small question is that countess_gui entry point is still installed even without the GUI extra. Is that intentional, or should the GUI entry point also be optional? It is probably okay, but for conda packaging it may be cleaner if the GUI command is only installed with the GUI extra, if that is feasible.

[nickzoic]

The GUI command actually works fine without the [gui] option, just the theming won't look quite as nice (that's ttkthemes) and the pop up help window will just go straight to a browser if there is one instead of displaying the help window (that's tkinterweb).

You used to be able to specify entry points to depend on extra tags but according to https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/specifications/entry-points/ :

Using extras for an entry point is no longer recommended.

The alternative would be to split the project into countess_core and countess_gui or something but I don't think that's a huge priority. I've made it print a warning message when starting the GUI if [gui] isn't installed and I reckon that'll be okay.

[PlushZ]

Yes, that makes sense, that should be fine as is. Thank you again so so much!