RFE: Replace use of `pkg_resources` with `importlib.metadata`

[kloczek]

Context

See discussions: astropy/astropy#11091 pypa/pip#7413

[tkloczko@devel-g2v SRPMS]$ rpm -ql python-sphinx-tabs | grep py$ | xargs grep pkg_resources
/usr/lib/python3.8/site-packages/sphinx_tabs/__init__.py:__import__("pkg_resources").declare_namespace(__name__)

Proposal

No response

Tasks and updates

No response

[foster999]

Thanks, that's great to know a better alternative exists. Is support for python < 3.8 built in or do we need to add anything to support the backport?

[kloczek]

I'm not sure. At the moment my main devel systems are (still) using python 3.8 (3.8.13). Soon I'll move all my stuff to 3.9 and than to 3.10. Nevertheless lokks like pkg_resources caused some issues with building sphinx documentation so after opening setuptools ticket I've learned that this issue will be not solved because genelereally setuptools maintainer wamnt to remove that module from setuptools tree.