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 ...