Re: Bug#1117799: ITP: python-update-checker -- A python module that will check for package updates.

[Aryan Karamtoth <spaciouscoder78@disroot.org>]

On 11/10/25 22:12, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 11, 2025 at 04:42:45AM +0000, Aryan Karamtoth wrote:
> > * Package name    : python-update-checker
> >  Version         : 0.18.0
> >  Upstream Author: Bryce Boe <bbzbryce@gmail.com>
> > * URL             : https://github.com/bboe/update_checker
> > * License         : BSD-2-Clause
> >  Programming Lang: Python
> >  Description     : A python module that will check for package updates
> >
> >
> > This is a dependency for python-asyncpraw and will be maintained 
> > under the umbrella of Debian Python Team
>
> Are you sure it's a good idea to package this in Debian?  It seems to 
> me that it would typically mean that users of packages using it in 
> (particularly) Debian stable would be presented with warnings about 
> outdated packages that they can't do anything about without switching 
> over to installing Python packages in a completely different way.
>
> I'd suggest patching out uses of it instead.  But in the case of 
> asyncpraw, while it does list update_checker as a dependency in 
> pyproject.toml, the actual code in asyncpraw/reddit.py already 
> tolerates the import failing and falls back to skipping the update 
> check in that case.  It seems to me that that's the behaviour we'd 
> actually want in the Debian python3-asyncpraw package anyway, so if I 
> were you I'd skip the extra work of packaging update_checker as well.
>
> Thanks,
It didn't occur to me that I could just patch out the update_checker dep 
until I filed the RFS. I was searching if any other distro packaged 
update_checker and Arch Linux did and python-praw needed it. Then I went 
to debian and checked the packaging of python-praw and noticed that Ben 
Westover patched and removed the update_checker dependency [1].

Since PRAW related libraries are the only ones that seems to be using 
this one and I have the chance to patch it, I'm closing this ITP and RFS 
bug since this package is not needed in Debian.

[1] 
https://salsa.debian.org/python-team/packages/praw/-/blob/master/debian/patches/update-checker.patch?ref_type=heads

--
Regards,

Aryan Karamtoth
IRC: SpaciousCoder78
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