citrination-client and plotly should be optional requirements about matminer HOT 3 CLOSED

Thanks for your comment @computron. Yes you are right in that I added those back to get the unit test to pass. I can certainly look into making them optional and skipping them in the unit tests, but a quick question before doing that - if and when a user wants to utilize a utility of matminer that makes use of these packages, eg: the Citrine data retrieval/plotting functionalities, are you saying it's better to show a "library not found" error at that time instead of forcing install right from the beginning along with matminer?

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Hi @saurabh02

I think it's a good question. In my book, there are a few reasons to go with optional dependency:

• the disk size of the dependency is large
• the dependency is difficult to install, e.g., cannot be auto-installed
• the dependency has some chance of breaking the auto-install (i.e., someone who wants to pip install matminer gets an error during the installation of the dependency - so they can't install matminer automatically, even if they never planned on using that sub-feature).
• The dependency has other dependencies that have one of the above characteristics.

Based on those criteria, I don't see a reason to make citrination-client optional and we can keep it as required so the user has access to the functionality without extra effort. If we find that the dependency breaks one of those criteria in the future, we should make it optional.

We can keep plotly for the same reasons. Again, if it starts breaking things we'll make it optional.

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Thanks for your thoughts @computron !

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