migrate pgk_resources to importlib_resources

[zormit]

Motivation

While playing around with the codebase, I saw a warning pop up (weirdly I'm having trouble to reproduce it right now) that pgk_resources is deprecated. It's not an important thing, but I took it as a small first issue to get a bit used to the codebase and the contribution mechanism again :)

Approach

When following the link in the warning, you'll be able to find a migration guide, which I partly followed.

Side-Effects

This probably closes #1911, because the dependency on pkg_resources is gone.

Open Questions

• I'm not sure whether I should have called importlib.resources.as_file in some of the places.
• It's a bit tricky because the state of things differs in the different python versions. I still have to find the right fix for that.

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[zormit]

@saulpw @anjakefala before I try to fix the version problems... what do you think of this in general?

regarding the version problems...
do you know why import_resources would not exist in 3.10, while it seems to work again in 3.11 (not sure though, the test was cancelled... 🤔 )? It is probably somehow an implicit dependency that got dropped from the providing package(s)?

[zormit]

weirdly I'm having trouble to reproduce it right now

Ok I realised my mistake. The warning only pops up when launching via the installed bin/vd:

% vd
/Users/mn/.venv/visidata/bin/vd:4: DeprecationWarning: pkg_resources is deprecated as an API. See https://setuptools.pypa.io/en/latest/pkg_resources.html
  __import__('pkg_resources').require('visidata==2.12.dev0')
saul.pw/VisiData v2.12dev

I'm not even sure how this file is generated, but I'd be curious to find out & maybe also remove the pkg_resources dependency from there. Probably through updating the underlying deployment dependencies, so I opened some kind of rabbit hole here...

[anjakefala]

Ahhh, thank you for tackling this @zormit! And researching what needed to change. I think bin/vd is generated by some installers.

I learned that importlib_resources is actually referred to as importlib.resources wrt the stdlib: https://docs.python.org/3/library/importlib.resources.html. I made the change, and tested locally. Let's see how the build looks!

[anjakefala]

Failing now because importlib.resources.files is new in Python 3.9! Hmmmm.

[anjakefala]

Seems like we need a try/except to use importlib.resources.files > Python 3.9, and importlib_resources.files in 3.8, 3.7: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6028000/how-to-read-a-static-file-from-inside-a-python-package. Which is a bit gross. We would also need to then install importlib_resources in 3.7, 3.8.

[anjakefala]

Upon further research, it seems like pkgutil can possibly give us what we want without the version challenges with importlib.resources: https://docs.python.org/3/library/pkgutil.html

[anjakefala]

I decided to go with importlib.resources and importlib_resources. It seemed like the change that was closest to pkg_resources, and when we drop support for 3.7 and 3.8, we will be in a good position.

[saulpw]

Thanks, @zormit and @anjakefala ! If everything seems to work, this is good.

[zormit]

Thanks for the review @anjakefala and pulling it through! :)