Do we really need quarto as Import?

[kellijohnson-NOAA]

stockplotr/DESCRIPTION

Line 51 in 3bc3137

quarto,

is causing installation issues for FIMS on linux and we are curious if stockplotr actually requires quarto. I am thinking that this is a relic of {asar} and is not needed for plotting and tables.

[sbreitbart-NOAA]

quarto is used to generate a HTML of all available figures and tables with html_all_figs_tabs(). Is this a long-term issue for FIMS? We could brainstorm other ways to produce the HTML.

[kellijohnson-NOAA]

We are running into issues with our bash script working on linux because quarto is not installing properly when it is listed as a dependency. I see a few options

1. We work on our bash script to install the missing dependencies for quarto, this does not help other users on linux who want to use stockplotr but cannot get quarto to install automatically
2. Work with quarto to ensure that it is properly installed when imported on all operating systems and not just mac and windows
3. Try to change the stockplotr DESCRIPTION file to ensure that quarto is installed for all operating systems successfully
4. Move quarto to a suggested package in the stockplotr DESCRIPTION file because not everyone is using the html functionality

[sbreitbart-NOAA]

Thanks for laying out those ideas. I think option 2 is the ideal solution but implementing it may require a long-term outlook; option 4 seems like the best short-term solution for now. @Schiano-NOAA thoughts?

[Bai-Li-NOAA]

Expand option 3 a bit: {stockplotr} imports {quarto}, which depends on {rmarkdown}. {rmarkdown} lists Pandoc under SystemRequirements, so installing {stockplotr} can implicitly require Pandoc even though that dependency is several layers deep. That appears to be what caused the FIMS setup.sh run to fail: Pandoc is not installed in the FIMS image. I wonder whether {stockplotr} wants to declare SystemRequirements in its own DESCRIPTION, similar to how {rmarkdown}
and {fs} do. Note that listing SystemRequirements in {stockplotr} will not automatically install these external dependencies for users. It just provide helpful context when debugging installation. It might be worth adding a GitHub Actions workflow to {stockplotr} that tests installation in a clean user environment.

See FIMS image error message below:

✖ Missing 4 system packages. You'll probably need to install them manually:
+ cmake        - fs              
+ libnode-dev  - V8              
+ libuv1-dev   - fs              
+ pandoc       - knitr, rmarkdown

Also, I noticed that the latest Pandoc build failed on the latest Ubuntu in the {rmarkdown} GitHub Actions runs. It may end up resolving itself once dependency packages fix their issues.