[Docs] Replacement for `distutils.filelist` ?

[Avasam]

Summary

I'm looking into progressively migrating distutil usage in pywin32 (mhammond/pywin32#2119), where distutils.filelist.FileList is used.
https://setuptools.pypa.io/en/latest/deprecated/distutils-legacy.html#prefer-setuptools and https://peps.python.org/pep-0632/#migration-advice don't mention distutils.filelist at all. I searched the documentation for filelist and could not find any deprecation or migration mention.

OS / Environment

Windows 10
Python 3.9
setuptools 68.2.2

Additional Information

Document a migration path for distutils.filelist

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow the PSF Code of Conduct

[abravalheri]

Hi @Avasam thank you very much for working on this migration.

Is there any chance you could replace the usages of FileList with something like stdlib's glob/pathlib.Path.{r}glob/os.walk?

I had a look on your setup.py and it seems that for the first usage in py_modules = expand_modules("win32\\lib"), that could be an option?

The other usage in convert_data_files maybe can also be done with {r}glob/os.walk, but alternatively, if you feel you need something more complex, you can also try to use something like pathspec or ignorelib¹.

What do you think?

Personally, I would like to avoid the extra work associated with maintaining something like a public FileList API.

Footnotes

1. You can add build-time dependencies using pyproject.toml's [build-system] requires = [...]. ↩

[Avasam]

Thank you for your response.

Indeed pywin32 doesn't do anything too complicated with filelist and it can all be replaced with pathlib and other similar API.

Before l started on that path, I wanted to inquire on the recommended migration path. And make sure that filelist is part of the API that isn't going to be re-exposed by setuptools.

The logic probably won't end up being a perfect 1:1, but I think re-implementing with your suggestions, with proper testing, is the way to go. Better than just copying FileList's code directly.

[Avasam]

The following doc was useful: https://docs.python.org/3/library/pathlib.html#correspondence-to-tools-in-the-os-module
Related PR if anyone wants to take a look for inspiration: mhammond/pywin32#2138

Path.rglob to replace FileList.findall + FileList.include_pattern.
FileList.exclude_pattern is a bit more complex, you'd have to use a comprehension that filters out on a regex (and convert any previously used glob patterns to regexes yourself), but in my case I was able to simplify it down to the following:

• path.suffix in {".pyc", ".pyo"} instead of a *.py[co] glob
• "\\directory_name\\" in file (where file = str(path) to have the normalized slashes) instead of a regex

You can close this issue if you don't think there is a need to document FileList migration paths.