Progressbar for ESO get_header

[m-samland]

I am working on a package that requires downloading a lot of headers for files from the ESO archive, which can take quite some time. I was wondering what the astroquery stance on progressbar utils is? Getting a progressbar would be very easy for this function by simply wrapping the for-loop in astroquery.eso.core.get_headers with the tqdm package and adding an additional keyword, e.g. "progress" to the function to toggle this (that's what I do in my local install). The only code line that needs to be changed is 572:
for dp_id in product_ids -> for dp_id in tqdm(product_ids)

However, this requires adding tqdm as a dependency. I'm sure there are many parts of astroquery that would benefit from having a simple progressbar, but I don't know what astroquery's policy for adding dependencies is.

[bsipocz]

We do use the ProgressBar from astropy at a few places (the main difference is that it handles parallel downloads), so adding a progress bar to ESO is totally fine.

Also, tdqm is quite a small additional dependency, so I would be on board of adding it if you rather use it directly than ProgressBar.

cc @keflavich

[m-samland]

I wasn't aware of the astropy implementation of ProgressBar. Do you know how it differs from tqdm? Does the astropy implementation work for jupyter notebooks? I'm not hell bend on using tqdm, I just use it because of how easy it is to use, so open to input. I agree that tqdm is not a huge dependency, but I guess we can avoid it if there is precedence in using native astropy for the same functionality.

[keflavich]

I think tqdm is more widely used and more flexible; I'd be happy to switch to it. But functionally, they're the same, and we can just make the progressbar type be specifiable by the user & default to astropy

https://docs.astropy.org/en/stable/api/astropy.utils.console.ProgressBar.html

[bsipocz]

Honestly, I don't know how nicely it works in notebooks or on log files, etc as I'm not using it at a user level.
Do would just reiterate, feel free to choose whichever works better for the module, if it's tqdm then we're happy to add it as a dependency.

(I really don't know what will happen to the astropy version, if it will stay there long term or will be deprecated or maybe just refactored to also use tdqm)

[keflavich]

tqdm works in both with from tqdm.auto import tqdm. I think the astropy version requires you to tell it what environment you're in.