[Debian-astro-maintainers] Bug#860811: python-pymoc should Suggest: python-healpy

[Paul Sladen]

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Source: pymoc
Severity: Wishlist

Currently in upstream pymoc, there is a soft dependency on healpy.  
The only place where is healpy is imported and called is into the
plotter (util/plot.py), in one function plot_moc().  Ideally this
relationship should be declaring in the packaging metdata.

However, Healpy is only available for some architectures (64-bit
ones), and so declaring a hard dependency on Healpy would make Pymoc
uninstallable for several architectures (including i386).

  Package: python-healpy
  Architecture: any-ia64 any-amd64 any-arm64 any-ppc64 any-ppc64el any-sparc64

Healpy itself in-turn relies on a large number of other packages.  
Therefore it would be preferable to only declare a soft Suggests: or
Recommends: could be added so that specialist functionaltiy can be
easily used by users on 64-bit architectures without inconviencing
other users.

Christian Dersch notes that Fedora currently uses a Suggests: against
Healpy.

Ole Streicher notes that the situation could probably be further
improved afterwards by wrapping the 'import healpy' in a try: except:
clause and skipping that part of the plotting when unavailable.  This
would allow the code to complete, even if some aspects, eg. grid
lines, would not be visible in the resulting output.(*)

	-Paul


(*) Hopefully upstream may be able to offer input as to whether it is
better to: (a) run through without drawing some of the output; vs. (b)
generate a stacktrace in these corner cases.

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