On Sun, Jan 16, 2022 at 7:41 PM Ralf Gommers <ralf.gomm...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all, > > Now that 1.22.0 is out the door, I think it's time to deprecate > `numpy.distutils` completely. > > A brief summary for context: > - `distutils` was deprecated in Python 3.10, and will be removed in Python > 3.12 (Oct 2023 release date) > - `setuptools` has re-enabled its vendored copy of `distutils` in its 60.0 > release. It's incompatible with `numpy.distutils` and many more breaking > changes are to be expected. > - Rebasing `numpy.distutils` on top of `setuptools` will be a moving > target. More importantly, `numpy.distutils` still has serious and hard to > fix bugs and design issues. For example, we cannot build SciPy in parallel > due to race conditions in the Fortran support code, and there's a very > elusive bug where building an extension module which links in a static > Fortran-only library is underlinked and breaks at runtime in dev > environments. > > My initial plan was to contribute Fortran support and other > `numpy.distutils` features to `setuptools`, but I've personally changed my > mind on that and don't plan to do that work. I think `setuptools` is moving > too slow for this to be a productive exercise, and the design of distutils > is fundamentally unfixable. So it's a much better investment of time to > help projects migrate away from `numpy.distutils` (and hence from > `setuptools`). > > The tracking issue for this is https://github.com/numpy/numpy/issues/18588. > Please see the comments and linked issue/thread for more details. > > My proposal is: > 1. deprecate `numpy.distutils` now in main. > 2. keep it around for another 2 years after the 1.23.0 release. On >=3.12 > it will raise an informative error when someone tries to import it. > 3. Only setuptools < 60.0 is supported. This is the status as of today - > unless there's an issue with Python 3.11 support, I don't see a point in > spending time on keeping up with new setuptools releases, a pin is just > fine. > 4. Write a docs page with migration info on how to deal with the > deprecation, and update it before the 1.23.0 release. > > Note that the setuptools maintainers have said that they are happy to > consider new features if people want to integrate them. The most > popular/useful features for `numpy.distutils` are (1) Fortran support, and > (2) nested setup.py support. The former is probably not a good idea to > integrate, the latter may be. There aren't many packages who need > BLAS/LAPACK support anymore, scikit-learn/statsmodels/etc. switched to the > Cython/C API exposed by SciPy, rather than linking to BLAS/LAPACK directly. > > For NumPy itself, we should move to Meson after the SciPy 1.9.0 release > has gone out and ironed out all the remaining issues there. We can revisit > that in 6 months or so. > > Thoughts? > I've opened a PR for this: https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/20875 Cheers, Ralf
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