This would give a false negative test result for actual bugs due to unintentional imports.

@lpsinger , can you please clarify? With this patch, from astropy.visualization import wcsaxes does not raise error, although people wouldn't try to use it without matplotlib anyway? This is no different from how astropy.io.misc.asdf is being handled right now in master.

Let's say that someone accidentally added an unintended dependency on package foo. You would want the line import foo to generate an error in the doctests. This would silence that error.

Let's say that someone accidentally added an unintended dependency

It would be ignored during collection, but you would think the tests that try to use that dependency would error out during run time, no?

Still, if unwanted dependency is added but somehow not used in testing, then yeah, I guess that would sneak pass. I am hoping in that case, we would catch it in code review, because the coverage would report that the LOC is not tested. 🤷

In addition, the name doctest-ignore-import-errors implies that this setting only affects doctest, and not regular tests? @jdavies-st recommended that we add this explicitly so we don't need to workaround a backward compatibility breakage over at pytest-doctestplus.

https://github.com/astropy/pytest-doctestplus/blob/dfc9e9f05f8c63f003d23fb82deacec11c6e3a11/pytest_doctestplus/plugin.py#L168-L176

Okay, I realized that my PR title and original text was misleading. Sorry! Hopefully, I clarified them.

Hi humans 👋 - this pull request hasn't had any new commits for approximately 5 months. I plan to close this in a month if the pull request doesn't have any new commits by then.

In lieu of a stalled pull request, please consider closing this and open an issue instead if a reminder is needed to revisit in the future. Maintainers may also choose to add keep-open label to keep this PR open but it is discouraged unless absolutely necessary.

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I think it is safe to close this

@astrofrog , any idea for #10302 then?