Requirements for the first prototype

[Nour-Mws]

The goal of the first prototype is to reach a working and usable tool with minimal functionality.
Namely, a user would be able to run fawltydeps as a command line tool in their Python project. FawltyDeps will:

• Automatically discover all Python code files (we would probably need to define an exclusion mechanism for .py files, e.g. setup.py, that are not to be parsed).
• Extract all the libraries used (imported) in the code.
• Automatically discover files declaring dependencies (supporting requirements.txt, setup.py and pyproject.toml).
• For each of the files above, extract all declared dependencies.
• Compare the two sets (of used vs declared dependencies) and output an error if a dependency is not declared and a warning if a dependency is declared but not used.

The first prototype will not:

• Have a mechanism to exclude Python files or directories.
• Have an extensive command line interface supporting the different options discussed in the design document (different mappings, local existing environments vs environment created from PyPI/Github, etc..)
• Implement any mapping from imports to dependencies and vice versa (and subsequently no connection to PyPI and no creation of virtual environments).

[jherland]

Looks very good to me. As for excluding setup.py, I'm not sure how many 3rd-party modules a file like that usually imports, so it should be fine to include it in the analysis, especially in the first prototype.

[Nour-Mws]

setup.py is the first thing that came to my mind and I agree that it isn't a very representative example as it probably would not have third party imports.
I remember I was exploring pigar with @mknorps and it just happened that the project we were on had a lot of spurious .py files. Let's get this aside for now until we have a concrete example. Maybe Maria will have a better memory.

[jherland]

No worries. 😄 I fully agree both that (a) we will need an exclude mechanism eventually, and (b) we don't need one in the first version.

[mknorps]

From our tests, I think spurious *.py files came from narrowing down a directory we used to input the script.

Regarding python source code, we should think also of *.ipynb files. Let's include them in the first draft. This is a common problem that you cannot run someone's notebooks because you miss dependencies.

[mknorps]

Update the documentation with the requirements of the FawltyDeps, see #14, #12 .