Make plotnine (and perhaps seaborn) optional?

[austinv11]

Hello, I was wondering if it was possible to specify plotnine as an optional dependency in your package. I.e. disable the integration if the package fails to import.

[KaikunXu]

Hi @ponnhide,

Thanks for maintaining patchworklib. I would like to add a reproducible detail to this issue: it still affects the PyPI wheel for patchworklib==0.6.6, and there appears to be a mismatch between the published wheel and the current GitHub source.

The patchworklib/patchworklib.py installed from the PyPI 0.6.6 wheel imports plotnine unconditionally:

import plotnine

However, plotnine is not included in the wheel metadata. The declared dependencies are only dill, matplotlib, numpy, pandas, and seaborn.

By contrast, the current main branch already guards the integration:

try:
    import plotnine
    import patchworklib.modified_plotnine as mp9
except Exception:
    pass

As a result, the optional-import fix visible on GitHub is not present in the wheel currently published as version 0.6.6. In a clean environment without plotnine, the following fails even when only the Matplotlib/Seaborn Brick API is needed:

pip install patchworklib==0.6.6
python -c "import patchworklib"

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'plotnine'

overwrite_plotnine() does not prevent this import-time failure; it configures plotnine compatibility only after the integration has loaded.

Would it be possible to publish a new patch release containing the guarded import already present on main? Until then, downstream packages such as pi-metaboqc must declare plotnine directly despite using only the Matplotlib/Seaborn composition API.