[DOC] Installing recOrder into an existing napari environment leads to cryptic errors

[talonchandler]

We've had a few issues where users with existing environments that includes napari try to pip install recOrder-napari then get cryptic errors. For example,

pip install napari[all]
pip install recOrder-napari
recorder reconstruct -h

leads to

RuntimeError: Please remove PyQt5 from your environment with `pip uninstall PyQt5`

and pip uninstall PyQt5 does not fix the issue...instead causing qtpy.QtBindingsNotFoundError: No Qt bindings could be found.

Instead, we can fix the issue with pip install napari[pyqt6]. I am planning to update the RuntimeError message to reflect this.

[talonchandler]

Whoops. This issue only affects the latest release of recOrder-napari.

If instead you install from the main branch:

pip install napari[all]
pip install git+https://github.com/mehta-lab/recOrder.git
recorder reconstruct -h

then everything works fine.

@ahillsley can you confirm that you ran into this issue from a PyPI installation? If yes, I'll close this issue. (This also means we're overdue for a stable release).

[yuminguw]

@talonchandler ,Hi Talon, this is Yuming. I am trying to use the latest release/version. But could not launch the recOrder-napari:
1st attempt:
pip install napari[all]
pip install recOrder-napari[acq]
napari -w recOrder-napari

2nd attempt:
pip install napari[all]
pip install git+https://github.com/mehta-lab/recOrder.git
napari -w recOrder-napari

error message:
File "C:\Users\polscopeCommon\anaconda3\envs\recOrder20250212\lib\site-packages\npe2_command_registry.py", line 34, in resolve
raise RuntimeError(
RuntimeError: Failed to import command at 'recOrder.plugin.main_widget:MainWidget': Please remove PyQt5 from your environment with pip uninstall PyQt5

Napari itself works as normal. The old version 0.2.0 tested on 2022 works. My computer is Windows 10. Do you have any workaround?

Thanks in advance!

[talonchandler]

Hi @yuminguw. Pardon us---it seems like 0.4.1 depended on napari[pyqt6_experimental] which is no longer supported by napari.

We've fixed this issue in our latest release candidates. I just tested pip install recOrder-napari[acq]==0.4.2rc1 and napari -w recOrder-napari, and I was able to launch the plugin.

[yuminguw]

@talonchandler thanks! Good to know. It's now working for me following the steps below:
(in Anaconda base environment)
conda create -y -n recOrder0.4.2rc1 python=3.10
conda activate recOrder0.4.2rc1
pip install napari[all]
pip install recOrder-napari[acq]==0.4.2rc1
pip uninstall PyQt5
napari -w recOrder-napari