Plugins with requirements?

[kunathj]

Some python modules could be useful to write nice monitoring plugins:

• uproot, awkward for python-style imports
• jupyter for interactive investigations
• plotly for html-based standalone event displays

Thoughts:

1. This should only be used for "non-essential"/optional stuff. Currently the required ROOT/python environment can be sourced from /cvmfs. It should stay that way for all standard tools.
2. I would like to give install instructions for those modules that are easy to follow, don't download unnecessary stuff (e.g. don't get a new python3 executable, but "stitch" the modules to the current python3) and don't need sudo access.
3. How should the modules be installed? pip install --user? pip install --prefix? Having them somewhere below this repository would be ideal.
4. A requirements-plugins.txt should list the necessary dependencies.requirements-plugins-frozen.txt with the exact versions that I used for development/testing.

[kunathj]

We settled on:

• On the monitoring computer during the test beam, have a conda environment with the root package from conda-forge.. In that same environment, just conda install any additional package that is needed (awkward, matplotlin, uproot,...)
• Ensure (in CI/CD) that the current code is compatible the an LCG view. Currently, we use LCG_101 (source /cvmfs/sft.cern.ch/lcg/views/LCG_101/x86_64-centos7-gcc11-opt/setup.sh, or the equivalent for another platform).