[Docutils-develop] [docutils:feature-requests] #109 Drop outdated copy of roman.py in docutils/utils

[Adam T. <aa-...@us...>]

Dear Günter,

I would suggest deleting `utils/roman.py` instead (it was an oversight in my patch).

Docutils (via Sphinx) is tested on every commit to CPython, so having a third party package that we don't maintain in the 'critical path' dependency chain is unhelpful, as it means that we would either have to patch `roman` ourselves (as you propose to do now) or wait for someone else to release a fix.

`utils/_roman_numeral.py` is a small module containing well-tested code, and designed with Docutils's needs in mind. It is also more permissively licensed.

A


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**[feature-requests:#109] Drop outdated copy of roman.py in docutils/utils**

**Status:** open
**Group:** Default
**Created:** Fri Oct 04, 2024 09:17 AM UTC by Günter Milde
**Last Updated:** Fri Oct 04, 2024 09:32 AM UTC
**Owner:** nobody


Back in the days without pypi and pip, Docutils developers decided to ship a copy of the small auxiliary module  [roman.py](https://pypi.org/project/roman/)  with Docutils in order to allow the package to stay free of any dependencies except Python (also a pre-requisite for the proposed inclusion of Docutils into the standard library).

In the year 2024, however, depending on an external module that 

* is available on pip, 
* has no other dependencies, and 
* is maintained 
 
should not pose an obstacle to Docutils users.

Commits  [r9845] and [r9846] added and adopted an alternative implementation of Roman  numeral support but did not remove the copy of the upstream `roman.py`.

I propose to remove both, `utils/roman.py` and `utils/_roman_numeral.py` and declare a dependency on [roman](https://pypi.org/project/roman/) instead.
(Lowercase roman to int support was added in the [upstream repo commit ffc86c4](https://github.com/zopefoundation/roman/commit/ffc86c43cb58438a37b9f5791669c35b17902957) Oct 1, 2024, so we would need to work around this until a roman.py release with this fix is available.


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