Working towards retiring PyXML

Last week I stumbled upon the fact that the newest python-docutils does not pass its unittests if PyXML is installed. Looking into the issue brought me to the conclusion that retiring PyXML may be the best thing to do as rrakus (the current PyXML maintainer) was interested in doing in February: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2012-February/163039.html The main reason to actively rid ourselves of the package as opposed to simply letting it die a slow death is that the python2 stdlib will replace its own xml module with PyXML if PyXML is installed. Since PyXML is dead upstream, the code there is older and buggier than the code in the stdlib that it is replacing (the root of my docutils unittest failure, for instance). With dmalcolm's help, I've taken a look at finding all the things using PyXML and figuring out how possible it would be to Retire PyXML: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Toshio/Remove_PyXML#Dep_analysis Most of the dependent packages are likely false deps. They can all be fixed just by removing the requires: PyXML from the spec file. But a handful of packages (9 by my count) actually use PyXML and would be broken by removal. I'm going to start looking at patches for these but I'm pretty sure that at least comoonics will require more work and a lot of cooperation from upstream. How do people feel about this work? * Seems generally like a good thing? * Seems like we can sacrifice comoonics and possibly some of the other packages on the Coding Required list if they aren't ported in time for F-18? * Need to explore other options such as stopping the python stdlib from replacing its xml module with PyXML and patching our packages that can't be ported to import pyxml explicitly? Thanks, -Toshio