Make docker dependency optional

[andreer]

Suggestion: make docker (and pontentially more) dependencies optional, in the case where pyvespa is only being used as a client library to an existing vespa setup.

[thomasht86]

Is it mostly to make the package lighter, or have you encountered any issues with regards to the docker dependency?
If only the first, considering the small size of the docker-package: https://pypi.org/project/docker/7.0.0/#files, i think it would not justify much effort.
If the latter, it would be easy to make a lightweight option (pip install pyvespa[no-docker]).
Then we wouldn't need to change anything in CI etc.

[tokle]

Suggestion: pip install pyvespa[no-docker]

[thomasht86]

Upon further investigation, I found that the suggestion contradicts the related PEP, and thus is not supported in pyproject.toml by default.

For projects which are packages, extras are a common solution for defining development dependencies, but even under these circumstances they have downsides:

• Because an extra defines optional additional dependencies, it is not possible to install an extra without installing the current package and its dependencies.
• Because they are user-installable, extras are part of the public interface for packages. Because extras are published, package developers often are concerned about ensuring that their development extras are not confused with user-facing extras.

I could still make it happen, by adding back a setup.py, but it doesn't feel like a good practice.

Given the small size of the docker dependency (259kB), is it worth it? @andreer @jobergum

[jobergum]

no

[thomasht86]

Checked whether the docker-package introduced many other dependencies as well, but it does not.

pip show docker

Name: docker
Version: 7.0.0
Summary: A Python library for the Docker Engine API.
Home-page: https://github.com/docker/docker-py
Author: 
Author-email: 
License: Apache License 2.0
Location: /Users/thomas/.pyenv/versions/3.11.8/envs/pyvespa-build/lib/python3.11/site-packages
Requires: packaging, requests, urllib3
Required-by: pyvespa

Ok to close the issue?

[jobergum]

👍