dependency on pyperclip should be optional

[jwilk]

pyperclip has exuberant requirements, so I'd like to avoid installing it on my system. The mitmproxy code already handles missing pyperclip gracefully. Unfortunately, the setup script declares pyperclip as an absolute dependency, so the generated scripts (such as mitmdump) won't run without pyperclip installed. Please consider moving pyperclip from install_requires to extras_require.

[mhils]

Thanks for the report. Looking at https://github.com/asweigart/pyperclip/blob/master/setup.py, I don't see any dependencies?

[dufferzafar]

@mhils pyperclip doesn't have any python based dependencies, but depends on some external commands like xsel etc. Check out the Readme.

And I think if mitmproxy really does handle missing pyperclip gracefully, then we should just make it optional.

[mhils]

I know, I fixed pyperclip's Windows support and added tests for the whole thing a while ago.
Again, pyperclip does not specify any required dependencies and I don't see an issue with installing it. We gracefully handle the case where pyperclip is installed but no clipboard provider is present.

[Dutchy-]

I feel that I should add my experience with pyperclip on windows in a cygwin/python 2.7 environment here:

$ python --version
Python 2.7.10

$ pip --version
pip 8.0.3 from /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages (python 2.7)

$ pip install pyperclip
Collecting pyperclip
  Using cached pyperclip-1.5.26.zip
    Complete output from command python setup.py egg_info:
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
      File "/tmp/pip-build-jn_4_r/pyperclip/setup.py", line 8, in <module>
        version=__import__('pyperclip').__version__,
      File "pyperclip/__init__.py", line 99, in <module>
        copy, paste = determine_clipboard()
      File "pyperclip/__init__.py", line 53, in determine_clipboard
        return init_windows_clipboard(cygwin=True)
      File "pyperclip/windows.py", line 26, in init_windows_clipboard
        from ctypes.wintypes import (HGLOBAL, LPVOID, DWORD, LPCSTR, INT, HWND,
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/ctypes/wintypes.py", line 23, in <module>
        class VARIANT_BOOL(_SimpleCData):
    ValueError: _type_ 'v' not supported

    ----------------------------------------
Command "python setup.py egg_info" failed with error code 1 in /tmp/pip-build-jn_4_r/pyperclip

Windows is not my main platform so I don't really care, but it would be great if mitmproxy could run without pyperclip

[mhils]

@Dutchy-: I think this is a duplicate of asweigart/pyperclip#55 - we can fix that, but I think it's not directly related to this discussion.

[mhils]

pyperclip compatibility with Cygwin is handled in asweigart/pyperclip#59.

[mhils]

I'm closing this for now. If there are any strong arguments we missed, I'm happy to re-open this discussion.