Can't import mne when installing from pip

For various reasons I don’t want to install MNE via the instructions in the documentation, but rather by using pip. However, the package on PyPI is not setup correctly to install dependencies. By simply trying to import mne, I get the following:

>>> import mne
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/Users/depalati/miniconda3/envs/thetamod/lib/python3.6/site-packages/mne/__init__.py", line 25, in <module>
    from .io.pick import (pick_types, pick_channels,
  File "/Users/depalati/miniconda3/envs/thetamod/lib/python3.6/site-packages/mne/io/__init__.py", line 15, in <module>
    from .base import BaseRaw
  File "/Users/depalati/miniconda3/envs/thetamod/lib/python3.6/site-packages/mne/io/base.py", line 22, in <module>
    from ..channels.channels import (ContainsMixin, UpdateChannelsMixin,
  File "/Users/depalati/miniconda3/envs/thetamod/lib/python3.6/site-packages/mne/channels/__init__.py", line 8, in <module>
    from .montage import (read_montage, read_dig_montage, Montage, DigMontage,
  File "/Users/depalati/miniconda3/envs/thetamod/lib/python3.6/site-packages/mne/channels/montage.py", line 19, in <module>
    from ..viz import plot_montage
  File "/Users/depalati/miniconda3/envs/thetamod/lib/python3.6/site-packages/mne/viz/__init__.py", line 6, in <module>
    from .topo import plot_topo_image_epochs, iter_topography
  File "/Users/depalati/miniconda3/envs/thetamod/lib/python3.6/site-packages/mne/viz/topo.py", line 14, in <module>
    from matplotlib.colors import colorConverter
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'matplotlib'

This can be fixed by including dependencies with the install_requires keyword argument in setup.py. Alternatively, why is mne/__init__.py importing so many things in the first place? If only a small subset of MNE’s functionality is required, why should a user have to install so many unused dependencies?

[agramfort]

sklearn 0.20 will do the install_requires for numpy and scipy:

https://github.com/scikit-learn/scikit-learn/blob/master/setup.py#L192

so I guess we could do it 😃

[mivade]

Thanks, @larsoner!