desimodel has a hidden dependency on xlrd about desimodel

[weaverba137]

PS, requests is another dependency hidden inside desimodel.inputs.docdb.

[sbailey]

The requests and xlrd dependencies are related to pulling engineering excel files from DocDB and extracting their contents into a more python/scientist-friendly format for desimodel/data. It would be good to have standard tests / fully documented procedures for that, but I don't think we need to take it to the level of travis testing: Dealing with the docdb credentials in a secure way would be a pain, and in practice the code is only updated infrequently in response to changes in the inputs when we need to propagate them into $DESIMODEL/data updates.

I propose improving the documented procedures with the next desimodel/data update, and maybe adding special case testing, but not adding this to the travis testing.

[weaverba137]

That sounds fair to me. In fact, just by importing the modules in the desimodel.inputs subpackage, I was able to increase the test coverage from 0 to ~10-15%.

[weaverba137]

@sbailey, PS, is xlrd an Anaconda package, or does it have to be installed by pip or some other means?

[sbailey]

@weaverba137 it is available via conda install xlrd.