Can someone help me figure out how to arrange a package with the structure as in ITensors.jl?

Tooling Package Management
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I want to split plotting functionality (which depends on Plots or Makie) from my main package to reduce loading time. I notice that ITensors.jl does the exact thing I want to do. But I have difficulty on how it works. For example,

  • as the subpacakges are in the same github repo, how can I register each of them?
  • Why there is an ITensorVisualizationCore module within the main package ITensor?

Thanks!

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TLDR: @JuliaRegistrator register subdir=path/to/my/package

Btw, instead of using subpackages or Requires.jl there might be better support for optional/weak dependencies in the (soon?) future, see e.g. Support in code loading and precompilation for weak dependencies by KristofferC · Pull Request #47040 · JuliaLang/julia · GitHub

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As for ITensorsVisualizationBase, I would think that it just hold common code that is shared among the different plotting backend packages.

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I am not confused with ITensorsVisualizationBase, but ITensorVisualizationCore, which resides in ITensors/src/ITensorVisualizationCore. Note that ITensorsVisualizationBase is a subpackage instead of a sub module inside ITensors (it locates at ITensors/ITensorsVisualizationBase)

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My bad. Don’t what this module is for exactly. Someone else should be able to comment on that.

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The reason for the ITensorVisualizationCore submodule within the ITensors module is to define the interface function visualize and macro @visualize, which I want to be able to use inside ITensors to help debug code by visualizing tensor contractions. However, I didn’t want all of ITensorsVisualizationBase (the common infrastructure of the various visualization backends like UnicodePlots and Makie) defined inside ITensors, so I defined ITensorVisualizationCore just to define the minimal interface that then gets extended by ITensorsVisualizationBase and the backend packages.

Perhaps there is a better way to achieve this. Ultimately it might make sense to have a separate VisualizationCore interface package that just defines visualize and @visualize which can then be loaded inside ITensors (analogous to packages like GitHub - JuliaArrays/StaticArraysCore.jl: Interface package for StaticArrays.jl) which then get overloaded by ITensorsVisualizationBase and extended by the various visualization backend packages.

Also I should probably re-implement some of this using the new Pkg extensions system coming to Julia 1.9 (5. Creating Packages · Pkg.jl).

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Great! Thanks for such a detailed explanation.