Implicit dependency on seaborn when extra plotting is disabled

[pearzt]

Without having seaborn installed in the (virtual) environment, import thicket fails as it tries to import seaborn:

  File "[...]/benchmarking.py", line 11, in <module>
    import thicket as tt
  File "[...]/lib/python3.11/site-packages/thicket/__init__.py", line 23, in <module>
    from .stats.display_boxplot import display_boxplot
  File "[...]/lib/python3.11/site-packages/thicket/stats/display_boxplot.py", line 7, in <module>
    import seaborn as sns
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'seaborn'

Workaround: Just install seaborn manually or use llnl-thicket[plotting].

Related to #137.

[ilumsden]

@pearzt the newest version of Thicket (2024.1.0) should resolve this. Since that release, all the re-exports that use seaborn are now protected by a try-except-else block (found here).

As a result, running import thicket will no longer produce any errors related to not having seaborn. However, if you run import thicket.stats without having seaborn installed, you will get the following message (not an error):

Seaborn not found, so skipping imports of plotting in thicket.stats
To enable this plotting, install seaborn or thicket[plotting]

One last thing to be aware of: to prevent these errors, we had to change how users import stats functions. As of this release, if you want to access the stats functions (e.g., mean, std, display_boxplot), you need to import them from thicket.stats. So, for example, if you wanted to import mean, you would do:

from thicket.stats import mean

@pearce8 we should probably make a note of this somewhere in our docs.

[pearzt]

@ilumsden I can still reproduce the issue with Thicket 2024.1.0. It seems to me that there still is an "import path" that imports seaborn unconditionally:

>>> import thicket
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "[...]/lib/python3.11/site-packages/thicket/__init__.py", line 13, in <module>
    from . import (
  File "[...]/lib/python3.11/site-packages/thicket/stats/__init__.py", line 24, in <module>
    from .display_violinplot import display_violinplot_thicket
  File "[...]/lib/python3.11/site-packages/thicket/stats/display_violinplot.py", line 7, in <module>
    import seaborn as sns
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'seaborn'

[ilumsden]

@pearzt thanks for checking. I just noticed that two of the "display" modules are not being protected by the "try-except-else" guard. I'll fix that.

[ilumsden]

@pearzt this issue will be fixed by #160