>But the Flask-Login team is not actively developing the extension anymore.
So they should tie the development to an extension that isn't in further development?
So they should tie the development to an extension that isn't in further development?
A better solution for a case like this would be to import the function from the Python standard library into the Flask namespace, so old code would still work. Then it wouldn't matter that Flask-Login is no longer actively maintained.
Also, as the article notes, Flask-Login is by no means the only Flask-using Python package that was broken by this change. Are all of those other packages no longer actively maintained? I doubt it.
Package maintenance also means to keep up with changes in the packages dependencies. If I don't do that, that's my problem, not the dependencies.
If I want to fix a certain version as my requirement, I can do so. Every major package system, including the ones used in Python, allow this. If I don't want that, then I need to keep my package maintained, and that means keeping an eye on what my dependencies do. That's part of package maintenance, simple as that.
There is no onus on the dependencies maintainers to care about whether I do my maintenance or not.
There's no "onus" on Flask to do anything they don't want to do. But if Flask forces every package that depends on them to fix a breaking change that they could have avoided with a one-line import statement, I would argue that is not very respectful of all those other package maintainers.
The reverse would be that every package that depends on flask forces it to make all future changes dependent on whether or not they break someones code. Which obviously isn't a sustainable model for software development.
> I would argue that is not very respectful of all those other package maintainers.
Define what is "respectful" then?
The flask team announces changes. They deprecate things. They use deprecation warnings. They use major versions correctly. They honor well established good practices in software development, to give package maintainers the opportunity to react to changes early.
Please, do explain: What else is required to meet whatever definition of "respectful" we are talking about here?
There’s also the option of releasing a package called something like flask2_compatibility that monkeypatches flask3 to work with flask2
Exactly.
Forever?
More net lines removed too.
But hey, it annoyed Man That Is Bad At Dependency Management and Wrote A Book About It so it must be bad!
Which, as the GP of my original post in this subthread argued, and I agree, is not respectful to your users. Importing the function from the Python standard library is a one-liner, hardly an arduous burden.
Open source is supposed to be a community. Forcing a breaking change like this on all their dependencies that they could have avoided with a one-line import statement is, IMO, not very good behavior as a community member.
No one is forcing a breaking change on anyone.
a) PIP usually retains past versions
b) A python package can specify it's dependencies, including their version, as hard requirements
c) virtualenvs exist
If he doesn't do that, and instead specifies only `some_dependency`, that signals to the package management software that the package works with the `@latest` version of that dependency. The onus to make sure that is, and continues to be, the case in code, is on the maintainer of the package, not the maintainer of the dependency, period.
And no, this is not "disrespectful". This doesn't go against any sense of community in FOSS. This is established practice in software development and package maintenance.
... would lead to even more outrage, because we tried that in the past. And the result were "rotting libraries", that became unmaintainable, incomprehensible, and riddled with hard to track and harder to fix bugs, because they had to drag along code that was often more than a decade old, kicking and screaming, just so libadbandonedsincebronzeage.so wouldn't have to issue an update.
So no, we should have breaking changes.
We should keep libraries vital and get rid of old code. We shouldn't drag along stuff just because we can. We have established procedures to deal with this, and with good reason.
- It's a significant piece of functionality.
- The change is trivial, not worth the cost of losing login.
In some instances Python deprecates something for six years, Flask six months.
That would break every single module that is compliant with flask 3.x and imports it with `import flask`. This simply isn't justified by the "benefit" of some old packages not having to change a single line of code.
Yes, maybe in hindsight it would have been beneficial to put the major version of some packages (flask is far from the only one) directly into the package name, as a workaround for pythons inability to deal with multiple versions of the same module under the same name in one environment. But python works as it does, `import flask` is how god-knows how many projects use it, so that's how the show runs, period.
If some package requires a certain version, it can pin that version in its `setup.py`. If a project requires a certain version it can pin that version in it's `requirements.txt`. If an environment requires a certain version, the admin can create a virtualenv.
Almost every practice in software development is a compromise that wouldn't be necessary if some decision in the past were different.
I think I agreed with you somewhere in this thread, that version-names (flask1, flask2, ...) are a better solution than major versions.
However, `flask` as an import name isn't going to go away. That is simply a reality and we have to work with it, because alot of projects rely on this. The same is true for tens of thousands of important software packages all over the OSS landscape.
So we can argue all day and then some over "what if"s...it won't change the status quo that exists, and in that state, semver is a good compromise that solves way more problems than it introduces.