Is it possible to remove h5py hard dependency from pip install?

[yongtang]

Summary

This is a feature request to see if it is possible to remove hard dependency of h5py from pip install?

At the moment, keras_applications only have two dependencies in setup.py, one is numpy and another is h5py. From the source code in keras_applications, I couldn't find other reference os h5py.

I am raising this issue, because h5py could not be installed on Ubuntu 18.04 + python 3.8 (deadsnake/ppa). Also tensorflow depends on keras_applications so at the moment it is hard to make tensorflow wheel package for python 3.8.

If h5py is removed from setup.py in keras_applications then supporting python 3.8 would be easier for quite a few packages downstream.

Environment

• Python version: 3.8
• Keras version: n/a
• Keras-applications version: 1.0.8
• Keras backend with version: tensorflow master branch

Logs or source codes for reproduction