Remove support for downloading from SVN

[jaraco]

I was just going to leave the functionality, but because it's relying on deprecated functionality (splituser), I'm ready to just strip it out. First, deprecate, then remove.

[pganssle]

I think the ideal deprecation points to "here's the correct way to do this". Is the deprecation going to be, "Migrate to something other than SVN", or something else?

I'm wondering if we can do something like adding a "download from svn" that does git svn to a temporary directory so that the essential functionality is preserved with minimal maintenance burden.

[jaraco]

the ideal deprecation points to "here's the correct way to do this"

Whole-heartedly agree.

The whole of package_index and easy_install is deprecated, but it will be harder to remove. The guidance should be to use pip install for everything, and install from package indexes like PyPI or a devpi instance.

My presumption is this functionality is no longer actively used... and the deprecation will help identify if there are.

do something like git svn

Interesting idea. The main issue I had was the handling of the SVN URLs - there's special parsing of the URL there that I don't understand.

[pganssle]

Interesting idea. The main issue I had was the handling of the SVN URLs - there's special parsing of the URL there that I don't understand.

How does pip handle this if you use pip install svn+...? Can we just pull in their solution in order to continue supporting this until easy_install is gone completely?

I am not opposed to starting with deprecating this, particularly if no one is using it, but if the alternative is "use pip", then I think if we're doing selective deprecation, I'd prefer if it were driven by, "There are no known use cases for this particular thing that pip doesn't cover" rather than "We don't want to keep supporting this weird subset anymore even though we're maintaining the rest of the deprecated package". It's completely fair to say "none of us use SVN, it's a super niche use and we want to warn them early because they're even more likely to hit bugs that we're not going to fix soon".

Sorry if this comes off as very wishy-washy, just trying to explore our options out loud.

[jaraco]

This issue is obsolete. The whole of package_index is removed in Setuptools 80.