pkg_resources is deprecated

[rolandmas]

Hello, your friendly Debian package maintainier here. It's been brought to my attention that the pkg_resources module is deprecated (see https://setuptools.pypa.io/en/latest/pkg_resources.html); this led to a bug report in the Debian PTS (see https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1083524), which I'd like to submit to you. I don't think there's any emergency at this point, but this should be fixed before the module in question is actually removed :-)

[borondics]

@rolandmas, thanks for the note!

@markotoplak, as far as I can see pkg_resources is only used in the PLS widget in orange-spectroscopy? If this is going to move to orange3 maybe we can just remove the widget altogether?

[markotoplak]

@borondics, version checks are easy.

The problem is the namespace package orangecontrib we use. There we need to be a little more careful. Some notes: https://setuptools.pypa.io/en/latest/userguide/package_discovery.html#finding-namespace-packages

[stuart-cls]

I think I got this working without pkg_resources (and pure pyproject.toml config) in https://github.com/Quasars/orange-spectroscopy-prototypes/tree/2024.11.14 ). We can test it there first in case I missed some 🤦 bugs :)

[markotoplak]

@rolandmas, are pkg_resources really a problem if the package explicitly requires setuptools, as is the case here?

The problem here is that a lot (almost all) orangecontrib packages use the legacy pkg_resources style of namespace packages. If I try changing styles, it still seems to work, but https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/guides/packaging-namespace-packages strongly discourages mixing namespace packaging styles. Therefore, for now, I'd stick to explicitly requiring setuptools. Is that a problem?

I did remove its other uses though.

[markotoplak]

I completely removed pkg_resources in #782, but am afraid to merge it for possible incompatibilities with other add-ons.

[stuart-cls]

@markotoplak I haven't seen any big incompatibilities with orange-spectroscopy-prototypes (no pkg_resources) and this add-on (with pkg_resources) but we're not currently shipping any widgets in protospec so maybe it's not a good test. I did notice some funny behaviour when uninstalling the package, pip didn't seem to be sure files belonged to which package. But it still worked fine.