Re: Proposal IRC meeting DPT

[Matthias Klose <doko@debian.org>]

On 29.06.24 20:29, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> On Saturday, June 29, 2024 1:36:41 PM EDT Soren Stoutner wrote:
> > Scott,
> >
> > On Saturday, June 29, 2024 8:58:09 AM MST Scott Kitterman wrote:
> > > I would say no.  Distutils is going to be with us for quite some time,
> > > even
> > > though it's no longer part of the standard distribution.
> > >
> > > Scott K
> >
> > Can you please elaborate on this some more?  As a maintainer of a couple of
> > packages that use distutils in some fashion I would appreciate understanding
> > the detail of what is happening with distutils in Debian.
>
> I can't say for sure.  I am assuming we will keep it in Debian in the short
> term independent of the Python interpreter packages, since removing it would
> break so many other packages.

short time meaning, that we will remove it once we are stopping to have 
3.11 as a supported version, which is usually as the final step of a 
python transition.  Please note, that python3-distutils has not been 
available for 3.12 at any time.

> According to codesearch.d.n over 600 packages reference disutils in their
> code.  That doesn't mean that they all use it, but it's a lot of packages.

this analysis is not good enough. it probably includes all stuff that 
can be used with the distutils included in setuptools.

> I think it's smart to work with upstreams to migrate away from it ASAP, since
> it isn't going to stick around forever, but I don't know the timeline.
>
> Of course, if no one volunteers to do the work to seperate it out of python3-
> stdlib-extensions, then it might come up pretty soon.  Is anyone planning on
> working on this (I confess I thought someone already had).

it will be removed once we stop having 3.11 as a supported Python version.

Matthias