[issue44246] 3.10 beta 1: breaking change in importlib.metadata entry points

[Anthony Sottile]

Anthony Sottile <asottile at umich.edu> added the comment:

personally I think they should be reverted -- they were not committed in spirit with the backwards compatibility policy: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0387/#making-incompatible-changes

- I don't think they were discussed thoroughly, and when opposition was presented it was not listened to thoroughly: https://github.com/python/importlib_metadata/pull/278
- the change significantly complicates importlib.metadata with lots of sneaky types (they all look like builtin types but do not act like them)
- it simultaneously introduces new apis and old apis which will both be around for extended periods of time but immediately moves to DeprecationWarning
- the new apis aren't remarkably better than the old apis -- the motivation was written as "typing issues" but without citing actual issues. in fact, the new items are significantly more complicated to type properly
- the change breaks many significantly important projects, from perusing related issues it's at the very least flake8, pandas, virtualenv, astropy, pytest, hypothesis -- and hundreds more from a quick github code search

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<https://bugs.python.org/issue44246>
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