Package dependencies make it difficult to use this library

[haunma]

I appreciate the spirit in which this has been written and given away to the community; however, requiring a whole slew of packages at specific [old] versions (numpy must be 1.23.2, matplotlib must be 3.6.1, and so on) makes this software almost impossible to use outside of a container, and therefore unsuitable for building into anyone else's work.

I was able to get the parts I wanted to test (the fiducial point algorithms) working by completely ignoring the dependencies and then resolving them one by one based on the errors generated. This is of course imperfect, e.g. modern versions of pandas are throwing a lot of dire warnings...

The effort required to fix this would be substantially reduced if the number of dependencies could be trimmed, perhaps through a partitioning of the "meat" and "visualization" parts of the library. Do you really need soundfile, scikit-learn, websockets, ...? Even pandas is a debatable requirement.

[godamartonaron]

Thank you for your thoughtful feedback.

We understand the challenge of managing numerous package dependencies, especially specific versions. To address this, we recommend using virtual environments, which can help avoid dependencies and ensure compatibility.
https://pyppg.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorials/pyPPG_example.html

We're continuously working to improve usability, and your insights are crucial to that process.

Thank you again for your support and for sharing your experience.

[haunma]

Thanks for your reply. I also use python virtual environments for separate projects, but I create them with the --system-site-packages option so that common dependencies like numpy, scipy, and matplotlib need not be reinstalled a dozen times on my system. IMO this is best practice, but I concede that with virtually unlimited disk space we are heading toward a "containers for everything" model (witness the popularity of appimage and flatpack). Unfortunately, again IMO.

I guess it depends if your goal is merely to provide a demonstration of methods from your paper, or if you would like to promote these algorithms to more widespread use.

[LeonardoSanBenitez]

Installing the library with containers is a good approach, but I had problems with the visualizations in headless/non-graphical environments.
For example, when running ppg_example() on a ubuntu:22.04 container I had the error:

File /usr/lib/python3.10/tkinter/__init__.py:306, in _get_temp_root()
    304 global _support_default_root
    305 if not _support_default_root:
--> 306     raise RuntimeError("No master specified and tkinter is "
    307                        "configured to not support default root")
    308 root = _default_root
    309 if root is None:

RuntimeError: No master specified and tkinter is configured to not support default root

Otherwise, it is indeed a great initiative :)

[saurabh-kataria]

pip install pyPPG==1.0.41 --no-deps might help

[godamartonaron]

Hi Leonardo,
I’ll take a look. Are you experiencing issues with the latest version? Which one are you using?
Best,
Marton

[HotDog702]

Yes, I also stuck in this problem. Why EXACT versions?? Why not range of versions???
Yes, I know, it needs some work to maintain, but in general you have to do nothing when only minor version number is changed!
What if other package I need will demand another version of scipy (for example)? I will not be able to use them together!