pass-through package dependencies

[bl-young]

Currently, flowsa has fedelemflowlist as a dependency in setup.py. The practical link here is that for FBS development we regularly implement elementary flow mapping using the FEDEFL.

However, for consistency in mapping across packages, we now use a common mapping function in esupy. So nowhere in flowsa is fedelemflowlist imported or called. Yet as implemented, fedelemflowlist is not a requirement for esupy. This is because esupy is meant to serve as a supporting package leveraged in a number of places. We can imagine that requiring fedelemflowlist as a dependency of esupy could lead to a string of requirements that's not often needed in most cases.

So this workflow seems to make sense and can be handled by the location of the import statements and catching of import errors.

The question is then is there any better way to handle this and/or to document to a user that a package like fedelemflowlist is required within flowsa as a pass through despite it never being called within the package?

[bl-young]

@a-w-beck @matthewlchambers any thoughts here? @WesIngwersen , @catherinebirney and I were discussing the other day.

[matthewlchambers]

Two thoughts:

1. I think the current workflow is fine, and most python users advanced enough to check whether/how fedelemflowlist is actually used within flowsa are also probably comfortable with optional dependencies, since these are pretty common (e.g. pandas uses extra packages for several of its data importing functions, which are not necessary to just install pandas).
2. I'll note that the current seea-recursive branch does actually use fedelemflowlist in its FlowByActivity.mapt_to_fedefl_list() method.

[matthewlchambers]

Since there's been no further discussion, I'm going to mark this as answered.