DEPS: replace pyperclip with pyclip #39834

[fangchenli]

• closes DEPS: change clipboard backend to pyclip #39834

[jreback]

wouldn't we need to include this as a dependency?

[jreback]

can you update the install.rst instructions for this
can you add a note in the whatsnew (put in the deps section, use a ..warning). as this is basically a breaking change.

so we may want to consider leaving the original impl here (though i find that annoying).

thoughts @pandas-dev/pandas-core

[Dr-Irv]

thoughts @pandas-dev/pandas-core

Here's my 2 cents, and I will leave it to the more experienced members of the core team to weigh in.

The proposal is that we depend on pyclip instead of pyperclip. Prior to today, I had never heard of either project, so my analysis is based on looking at their GitHub repos.

pyperclip is a project that has been around for almost 10 years. There has not been much activity lately in terms of commits , and it has 71 open issues. But the latest PR was merged on 2/20/21. There have been multiple contributors over the 10 years. As an outsider, I would say that it is probably a pretty stable piece of code.

pyclip is a much younger project, started in January of 2021. There is one contributor. So it is most likely not as "battle tested" as pyperclip. I'd be a little concerned about having pandas depend on such a young project.

So unless pyclip is fixing an issue that affects pandas users that is a problem with using pyperclip, I'd vote for not making this change.

But others may feel differently, because pyclip is the more active project.

[rhshadrach]

I'll only add that it appears pyperclip requires less on our side, which I love. But I agree with @Dr-Irv assessment. I feel wary adding a 2 month old project, even as an optional dependency. I also wonder how used this feature is (SO gives 161 results for pandas clipboard)

[bashtage]

I think this is a nearly interactive only function, so I'm not sure it will show up much in github. I have used it a few times in the past month in quick experiments.

[bashtage]

@Dr-Irv you have an unfortunate type in the fourth paragraph. (fixed)

[jreback]

thanks @fangchenli let's reconsider this after the project is a bit more mature.