sphinxcontrib.applehelp should be distributed as sphinxcontrib_applehelp

[ghost]

Describe the bug

If you look at how the distribution packages are named here: https://pypi.org/simple/sphinxcontrib-applehelp/ you will see that for some reason this package changed name in the last version. sphinx package didn't update to depend on this package correctly.

For no good reason pip seems to replace the dot in the package name with a hyphen, and this makes it possible to install sphinx using pip, but pkg_resources doesn't do it (that's correct way to do it), and so sphinx isn't installable in this way. Most importantly, this leads to build_sphinx setuptools extension becoming unusable.

In other words, it's no longer possible to specify sphinx in setup_requires list, because that would lead to setuptools trying to resolve dependencies for sphinx, but failing to do so because sphinx needs sphinxcontrib_applehelp , but such dependency cannot be installed, because once found package called sphinxcontrib.applehelp pkg_resources will not try to look for a different version or anything like that, it'll just declare that the package doesn't exist.

In general, you shouldn't upload a package named differently into the same repository: the packaging system is already in shambles, and it's sure not prepared to deal with such cases. Why go looking for trouble if the obvious way was to use simpler naming schemes?

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This behavior exists at least in Python 3.8, setuptools 56.0.0.

How to Reproduce

Create setup.py and specify sphinx in setup_requires list.

Environment Information

Sphinx is not installable.

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BTW, this is the commit responsible for the breakage.

Also, the fact that using pyproject.toml is more recent, doesn't mean that it's better. It's actually worse... There's absolutely no reason to use it. Undoing this whole commit would've made the project a little bit better.

[benoj]

I think this issue is blowing up my CI - any workarounds?

[ajslater]

This currently breaks downstream builds like ninemoreminutes/xapian-bindings

[bachya]

Any update on this? I can't install my package's dev environment because of this issue:

• Installing sphinxcontrib-applehelp (1.0.3): Failed

  KeyError

  "There is no item named 'sphinxcontrib.applehelp-1.0.3.dist-info/WHEEL' in the archive"

  at ~/.asdf/installs/python/3.11.2/lib/python3.11/zipfile.py:1473 in getinfo
      1469│     def getinfo(self, name):
      1470│         """Return the instance of ZipInfo given 'name'."""
      1471│         info = self.NameToInfo.get(name)
      1472│         if info is None:
    → 1473│             raise KeyError(
      1474│                 'There is no item named %r in the archive' % name)
      1475│
      1476│         return info

[nodiscc]

This breaks all sphinx installations where sphinx is installed through another module's install_requires=[].

In my case this doesn't prevent installation, but sphinx-build will fail at run time, regardless of sphinx version:

$ sphinx-build -b html -c tests/ tests/awesome-selfhosted-html/ tests/awesome-selfhosted-html/html
Running Sphinx v5.3.0

Extension error:
Could not import extension sphinxcontrib.applehelp (exception: No module named 'sphinxcontrib.applehelp')

Are there any plans to fix this, or known workarounds?

Edit: a workaround I found is to install sphinx manually using pip install sphinx

[nodiscc]

@AA-Turner any chance of reverting the commit responsible for this?

[nodiscc]

breaks all sphinx installations where sphinx is installed through another module's install_requires=[]

The problem was fixed by using python3 -m pip install . instead of python3 setup.py install to install the package which lists sphinx in its install_requires (nodiscc/hecat#115).

Invoking setup.py directly is deprecated https://blog.ganssle.io/articles/2021/10/setup-py-deprecated.html.