Contributing instructions do not work on Windows

[rockg]

A step in the contributing guide is to use the command make setup_subs. However, this does not work easily on Windows (uses make, rm, rsync). Is it worth moving this functionality to setup.py to be more platform-agnostic? Or is there some other preferred method of setting up one's plotly.py development environment on Windows?

[jonmmease]

Thanks for the suggestion @rockg. Yeah, I'd love to get all of the functionality from the makefile moved into setup.py tasks and then get rid of the makefile altogether.

It looks like git and rsync are the only two commands that the makefile executes that don't have direct analogs in pure python. We could call the same git commands using a subprocess since git works the same across platforms. We could try replacing the rsync commands with delete and copy operations and see if the runtime is still reasonable.

Is there anything here you're interested in working on?

[rockg]

I'll be happy to do this. I agree that rsync should easily be replicated with standard library python and that git should move into subprocesses.

[rockg]

I notice that mplexporter and chunked_requests already live in the plotly.py project not as submodules. Further, the commit times in plotly are more recent than the mplexporter and chunked_requests submodule commits themselves.

For example, plotly's mplexporter was updated 11 months ago, but the corresponding file in the mplexporter for the commit referenced in the submodule is 5 years old. Similarly with chunked_requests (5 months for the plotly file, 3 years for the chunked_requests file). Do the submodules even need to be used?

[jonmmease]

Thanks for pointing that out @rockg, it looks like there has been some activity on the mplexporter project sync we last synced things up, so I'd like to keep that submodule around and then I'll sync and test it for our next release.

It doesn't look like there have been any changes made to chunked_requests since our last sync, and in fact I made a change to it 5 months ago without realizing it was a submodule!

@chriddyp, do you want keep chunked_requests as it's own repo and backport my change in 5138734? Or should we just remove the submodule and make the plotly.py version authoritative?

[gvwilson]

Hi - we are currently trying to tidy up Plotly's public repositories to help us focus our efforts on things that will help users most. Since this issue has been sitting for several years, so I'm going to close it. If it's still a concern, we'd be grateful if you could open a new issue (with a short reproducible example if appropriate) so that we can add it to our backlog. Thanks for your help - @gvwilson