[gentoo-user] Re: 17 new packages because pip wants to write poetry?

[Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwards@gmail.com>]

On 2024-07-29, Eli Schwartz <eschwartz@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
>> It turns out dev-python/poetry has nothing to do with poetry, so my AI
>> paranoia was unjustified (this time), but one wonders what devs are
>> thinking when the decide they add dozens of new dependencies like
>> that. Why does pip suddenly need to format (or produce?) both markdown
>> and RTF when it's been able to get along fine without them for so many
>> years?
>
> For many years, pip has contained bundled libraries. These libraries
> recently got unbundled, and now you're installing a system copy.

Yep, I figured that was probably the answer.  I (for one) would
appreciate some sort of notice when such an unbundling happens so that
I don't waste time trying to track down why emerge suddenly wants to
install a bunch of new packages.  I can't really come up with a good
mechanism for that other than news items.

> pip has always "needed to format (or produce?) both markdown and RTF",

OK, now I'm genuinely curious: what does pip need to do with markdown
and RTF? My first guess was that its man pages aren't written in nroff
any more and somehow markdown was being used. [I already had at least
one markdown implementation installed, but pip apparently demands a
different one.] But there is no man page for pip. There are a bunch of
documents in /usr/share/doc/pip-<ver>, but they're all reStructured Text.

Oh well, I guess I should be thankful it didn't force LaTeX and pandoc
installs.

> but it also "needs" to use bundled libraries to do it without people
> noticing that it does it.  Some of those packages are only bdeps,
> and you can feel free to e.g. delete poetry via
> emerge -c --with-bdeps=n once you're done updating.

I usually just leave bdeps installed. Otherwise that would remove 130
other packages as well (some of which take a looong time to build).

--
Grant