I recently started thinking about conditional modules, while working on making sure Requires.jl works on 0.6 and I thought it would be helpful to recap discussions I had with @jameson and @tkelman . This follows in similar veins to julep: conditional modules · Issue #6195 · JuliaLang/julia · GitHub a…

[image] jeff.bezanson: How do we express version requirements for optional dependencies? I think this is a very important point. Wouldn’t Plots be much more naturally be organized as follows using Plots #this only has abstract stubs using PlotsPyPlot #Pulls in the implementation of Plots

Yes, I’ve thought before that optional “glue” code should go in separate packages. Linux distros have long done this, for example with packages like python-foo for python bindings to library foo. Then all that’s needed is a convenience feature that automatically loads A_B_Glue if A and B are both lo…

I’d agree with you if there wouldn’t be the issue, that it’s not so easy to merge interfaces/APIs across modules (export non-merge). So if Plots exports a Plots.plot the plot function cannot be used/exported anywhere else. You’re right, with a clear dependency tree this could be avoided, but then th…

That’s also an important issue, but I think it’s largely separate. It would come up even without optional dependencies.

I think in past discussions it’s been broadly agreed that something like conditional modules are the right long-term approach, and things like versioning can work with that. The only issue is that designing it completely is a huge project, when something much simpler can do a lot to solve the immedi…

[image] jeff.bezanson: Yes, I’ve thought before that optional “glue” code should go in separate packages. Linux distros have long done this, for example with packages like python-foo for python bindings to library foo. Then all that’s needed is a convenience feature that automatically loads A_B_…

Thanks @ChrisRackauckas , that is valuable experience. For my part, I’m not so much interested in satisfying every need, rather just getting the core abstractions “right”. For example, if we had separate module and conditional-module features, that could create ongoing maintenance burden where we ha…

I think the problem with putting shim code into a different package has two problems. The first one is usability e.g. the user needs to explicitly install the shim, since non of the base packages will depend on it, and the second is that it can lead to combinatorial explosion in the number of small …

Optional dependencies / Requires.jl

Internals & Design

tobias.knopp April 20, 2017, 6:14pm 24

Whats is interesting to note is the question if “Package == Module”. Because another model would be to have:

using Plots
using Plots.PyPlot

This would allow to selectively enable modules.

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Optional dependencies / Requires.jl

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