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setup.py relies on deprecated pkg_resources

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Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
28/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
build-system

Research direction

Start by reading setup.py around lines 191 and 204-205, then compare the existing PR #1314 with the packaging approach used by uvloop. Done means the source-build path no longer imports deprecated pkg_resources while preserving the intended Cython dependency behavior.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Summary

setup.py imports and uses the deprecated pkg_resources module (from setuptools) to validate the installed Cython version when building asyncpg from source:

import pkg_resources
...
cython_dep = pkg_resources.Requirement.parse(CYTHON_DEPENDENCY)
if Cython.__version__ not in cython_dep:
    ...
Problem

pkg_resources has long been deprecated by setuptools: importing it emits DeprecationWarning: pkg_resources is deprecated as an API, and it is slated for removal. On recent setuptools/distro configurations it may no longer be importable at all, which can make source builds of asyncpg warn or fail.

Existing work / options
  • Drop the check: open PR #1314 already proposes removing the Cython version check from setup.py entirely to eliminate the pkg_resources dependency.
  • Port to packaging: alternatively the check can be preserved by switching to the packaging library, as the sister project uvloop did in MagicStack/uvloop@b377b7c6885a1eb63cb8cf19db5ab66a12c79e21 — replacing pkg_resources.Requirement.parse(...) with packaging.requirements.Requirement(...) and x not in dep with dep.specifier.contains(x, prereleases=True) (adding packaging to build-system.requires). pkg_resources.Requirement.__contains__ used prereleases=True internally, so passing prereleases=True preserves the original behavior exactly.

Either approach removes the deprecated dependency. Filing this to track the deprecation as an issue alongside the in-flight PR #1314.

Dominant language
Python
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Merged PRs (30d)
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