pipdate dependency

[mikedh]

Hey, thanks for the library, it looks great!

I noticed that pipdate is a soft dependency already:
https://github.com/nschloe/meshio/blob/master/meshio/__init__.py#L24-L30

Would you be willing to remove it from install_requires?
https://github.com/nschloe/meshio/blob/master/setup.py#L31

It's also a little atypical for libraries to actively complain when they need to be upgraded- generally that's left to the package manager 😁

[nschloe]

Does it cause any problems?

[mikedh]

I think it may be a difference in expectation: when I'm importing a library, I'm expecting it to not do network queries until I explicitly call functions. This assumption holds true for pretty much every library in both the standard library and the numpy/scipy/conda-forge ecosystem.

I think the upside of the pipdate requirement is that the user gets a message when they haven't upgraded in a while.

The downsides are the user gets a nag message they may not want or care about, the library does unexpected network queries (which may hang imports for up to timeout=1.0 seconds), and the dependency tree expands.

That being said, it's your party and I'm not trying to impose my lifestyle choices! Feel free to close if you disagree.

[nschloe]

I get the point. I might think about it in the future, but see no real urgency for now. If more people +1 this request, I'll reopen.

[kinnala]

+1

[kinnala]

Just a note that this would also drop the number of extra dependencies; pipdate depends on appdirs and requests, and requests depends on urllib3, chardet, idna, certifi. All this seems to be not so useful for the typical use case of meshio.

[nschloe]

this would also drop the number of extra dependencies

Frankly I couldn't care less about the dependencies. Those packages are so small that bandwidth and storage space cannot be issues. Plus, requests is so popular as a package that in all likelihood you'd still have it if meshio drops the pipdate dependency.

[sigvaldm]

+1

First of all, good work with meshio. It's great.

Like @mikedh, I don't like packages to do networking behind my back. It was not at all obvious that meshio did this, although it does so for a completely innocent reason. I also agree this is a job for the package manager. Second, if I were to import meshio into another program and share it (currently, it's only for my own use), I would like to maintain control of the output of my program. It's common practice to leave printing to the end user of libraries.

These are only my two cents.

[nschloe]

Alright, three is a party. Just removed pipdate and updated to v2.3.6.

[sigvaldm]

Thanks for listening, and thank you again for the good software.