Installation instructions; pip install fails on macOS

[martinfleis]

Hi,

as part of openjournals/joss-reviews#1882 I am trying to simply follow your installation docs and initially I did not succeed. (under macOS 10.15)

conda create -n splot python
conda activate splot
pip install splot

...
Collecting pyproj
  Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/8c/7e/c34acb5abca1916ba0a294df4a90935d6d1cfc446ad1c076986bbf0118d3/pyproj-2.4.1.tar.gz (462kB)
     |████████████████████████████████| 471kB 2.8MB/s 
  Installing build dependencies ... done
  Getting requirements to build wheel ... error
  ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1:
   command: /Users/martin/anaconda3/envs/splot/bin/python /Users/martin/anaconda3/envs/splot/lib/python3.8/site-packages/pip/_vendor/pep517/_in_process.py get_requires_for_build_wheel /var/folders/d0/qyf0yvzd0n9ctn2wr3r4l1vw0000gn/T/tmp889iudeu
       cwd: /private/var/folders/d0/qyf0yvzd0n9ctn2wr3r4l1vw0000gn/T/pip-install-4pkixl3a/pyproj
  Complete output (1 lines):
  ERROR: Minimum supported proj version is 6.2.0, installed version is 5.2.0.
  ----------------------------------------
ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1: /Users/martin/anaconda3/envs/splot/bin/python /Users/martin/anaconda3/envs/splot/lib/python3.8/site-packages/pip/_vendor/pep517/_in_process.py get_requires_for_build_wheel /var/folders/d0/qyf0yvzd0n9ctn2wr3r4l1vw0000gn/T/tmp889iudeu Check the logs for full command output.

I am aware that you are saying that it is compatible with 3.5 and 3.6 only (why? because of this issue?). Using conda create -n splot python=3.6 it goes well. But it can be confusing.

I am perfectly aware that this is not splot issue, but pyproj, being dependency of GeoPandas. As installation of geopandas from pip is notoriously problematic (http://geopandas.org/install.html), I would welcome a bit more information in your docs what to do. I can install geopandas from conda-forge and then splot from pip, which works perfectly, but this information could be in the documentation.

I see that splot is on conda-forge in the same version as on PyPI, why you don't mention this option as well? conda install -c conda-forge splot works smoothly.

I would recommend adding conda-forge option to documentation and link to geopandas docs for pip troubleshooting (as the issue is caused by geopandas).

Also, I do not understand 'splot supports python 3.5 and 3.6 only' note as from conda-forge it comes with 3.8.

[martinfleis]

One more thing.

Is there a clearly-stated list of dependencies? Ideally these should be handled with an automated package management solution.

It is handled by pip or conda, but it might be nice to list dependencies you require so we know what you are installing.

[martinfleis]

Now I see that all of it is in Readme. Maybe it is worth to put it to docs as well?

[slumnitz]

addressed in #96