[Enhancement]: mocapy strict install requirements are problematic

[JarronL]

Instrument or Category

PSF Subtraction

What is your suggestion?

Currently, mocapy (https://github.com/jgagneastro/mocapy.git) is used to help generate a database of reference star for the PSF library in psf_lib.py. However, mocapy is that it has very strict installation requirements:

INSTALL_REQUIRES = [
  "numpy==1.26.4",
  "pandas==2.2.2",
  "SQLAlchemy==2.0.30",
  "PyMySQL==1.1.1",
  "uuid==1.30",
  "matplotlib==3.9.0",
]

This tends to unnecessarily downgrade a number of python packages. From my testing, mocapy runs perfectly fine on the python 3.12 with numpy 2.1, matplotlib 3.10, etc. So, it seems like these requirements are overly restrictive. There are a few possible options moving forward:

1. Eliminate mocapy as a dependency, perhaps through standard astropy queries
2. Create a pull request on the mocapy repository to fix this issue (best option for community in general?).

I've already submitted an issue to their repository requesting an update and simple fix, so hopefully this issue will become moot soon.

Error traceback output

No response

What operating system are you using?

No response

What version of Python are you running?

Python 3.12

What Python packages do you have installed?

No response