[Bug]: Remove dependency on setuptools

[lpsinger]

Steps to reproduce

The package setuptools is listed in project.dependencies in the pyproject.toml file, but the code never imports setuptools or pkg_resources. Please remove the unnecessary dependency.

Relevant log output

N/A

What did you expect to happen?

No dependency on setuptools. Setuptools is ordinarily only required at build time, anyway.

Version

0.29.1

Docker Versions (if used)

N/A

OS

MacOS

On which CPU architecture did you run Pathway?

ARM64 (AArch64, Apple silicon)

[zxqfd555]

Thank you for reporting!

We'll investigate, if anything depends on it (most likely, nothing) and then will proceed with the deletion this week.

[zxqfd555]

Upon investigation, we've figured out that it's the pyfilesystem connector, which has a dependency on the pyfilesystem library, which, in turn, depends on setuptools implicitly.

The setuptools used to be included in the standard Python distribution until version 3.12. As a consequence, imports for pyfilesystem without setuptools in place fail on the newest versions of Python. There are long-lasting attempts to fix that (for example: PyFilesystem/pyfilesystem2#577, there are also similar PRs and issues), but the library appears to receive limited maintenance.

Given this, and the lack of evidence of widespread usage of this connector, we've moved pyfilesystem into a separate setup option: pathway[pyfilesystem], containing pyfilesystem itself and implicitly required setuptools. For those who don't use this connector, the standard installation will no longer include setuptools as a dependency.

[zxqfd555]

Done, released in 0.30.0.