Most of the folks who can actually do something about this don’t browse the #users category, and there’s already an active thread about this, so I’ve merged these posts with that one. Its particularly interesting to see cases where installing the backport apparently actually breaks things, beyond being a minor nuisance or a source of confusion.
In fact, browsing the #users section as I occasionally do, I noticed at least three instance in the past week of problems and general confusion directly due to these old backports:
-
@kknechtel 's post here linking the python - AttributeError: type object 'Callable' has no attribute '_abc_registry' - Stack Overflow SO post, where installing the
typingbackport unnecessarily can actually cause breakage in certain edge cases -
The post Pip install hashlib help where the user attempted to install the ancient (<Python <2.5)
hashlibbackport, but fails to install on Python 3 due to incompatible syntax and results in a relatively cryptic error. -
The post Conda Remove error on creation of new .exe file where a conda environment with the
pathlibbackport installed resulted Pyinstaller erroring out (with an apparently clear error, but the user was unsure of what to do about it). This also linked to a Stack Overflow post where a number of users had the same problem with that backport.
Seems there’s more motivation than I thought to do something about this…if the discussion trickles off here, I can move this to #packaging to get more feedback there.