Is there a replacement for distutils.command.clean with setuptools >= 49.1.2?

[DougBurke]

I am following https://setuptools.pypa.io/en/latest/deprecated/distutils-legacy.html trying to update a package which includes

from distutils.command.clean import clean as _clean

The best I've come up with is the following, but is there a better way to do this?

# Is there a better way to get hold of this?
from setuptools._distutils.command.clean import clean as _clean

The python package in question builds some compiled code using configure and so it hooks into clean to remove the debris from that step. I would prefer removing this override, since git clean -dfx is likely a more-robust solution, but someone may be using it so if I can say "using clean is a bad idea nowadays" I have some justification!

[webknjaz]

Invoking setup.py directly is highly discouraged: https://blog.ganssle.io/articles/2021/10/setup-py-deprecated.html. Would this explanation be enough?

[webknjaz]

Also, you should probably move this discussion to the Q&A category.

[DougBurke]

Ta for the link. So, the discussion at https://blog.ganssle.io/articles/2021/10/setup-py-deprecated.htm includes the text

Right now the most common targets have replacements: install, sdist, develop [5] and bdist_wheel all have standards backing them, and test can be replaced by tox, nox or even a Makefile. If you use one of the more obscure commands and cannot find a replacement, it would be good to raise that on the packaging discourse to see what replacements are or could be made available.

I claim that this is my attempt at trying to find out what the replacement is. I'm using this venue rather than the discourse because https://setuptools.pypa.io/en/latest/deprecated/distutils-legacy.html told me to come here.

So it would be helpful to know if there is going to be a replacement for clean in some manner or whether it is going to be removed (reading between the lines of discussions on editable install I assume the clean option is not likely to be kept around).

[We also have commands that we've added to configure the extensions we are building, but I'm trying to understand the easy ones first]

[webknjaz]

So it would be helpful to know if there is going to be a replacement for clean in some manner or whether it is going to be removed (reading between the lines of discussions on editable install I assume the clean option is not likely to be kept around).

[We also have commands that we've added to configure the extensions we are building, but I'm trying to understand the easy ones first]

I don't think it makes sense given that PEP 517 doesn't have any protocol for this. Moreover, the build env setup is usually up to the build front-end (pip or pypa/build, for example) and they often just create "throw-away" virtualenvs under /tmp that you wouldn't need to clean up. I know that pip is experimenting with having in-tree builds, though but dunno all that implications. Either way, I'd expect this to need an interface on the front-end side rather than a backend (which setuptools is).
PEP 517 has a mechanism for passing free-form args additionally but the hooks for building wheels and sdists would normally get those and there's no "cleanup" hook in the standard. Besides, setuptools doesn't currently implement this mechanism anyway, and pip doesn't as well. AFAIK only build has support for the custom args.
Note, that in the modern world, you should use build for your packaging process. Some people used to abuse setup.py to be an all-in-one arbitrary commands runner which should've never been possible in the first place. If you want that, there are tools like tox/nox/make that are better suited anyway.
As for the customizations around building extensions, that will probably still work (depending on your setup). The problem is that setuptools grew w/o any standards and different people probably ended up putting all sorts of code there turning it into a generic task runner. I think it should still be possible to integrate it all so that it's called by the hooks since the distutils/setuptools commands can call other distutils/setuptools commands.
But if there's something very different from the rest of the ecosystem, you may end up writing your own PEP517 in-tree backend just for your project.

[DougBurke]

For the clean case I have decided to just remove that command. The remaining commands I'm leaving for now as they extent numpy.distutils commands and I honestly don't have the time to understand what the current state is there (and I definitely don't want to have to go to the effort of learning how to build a back end myself ;-)

Thanks for the input.