Remove or replace unmantained pylibmc package from Django dependencies

[Paolo Melchiorre]

As we discussed in the recent PR ​Refs #36005 -- Bumped minimum supported versions of 3rd-party packages. pylibmc has not a recent release with wheel for Python 3.12.

It also created issue for psycopg testing pipeline ​Hard to satisfy dependencies in Django tests

Apart from that it seem pretty unmaintained. Would it be possible to replace it with something better maintained or remove it?

[Sarah Boyce]

These are my initial thoughts:

• I can see in 19c4052f98e5dc4fe9d7edd7125df6a66efbd79f as part of adding Python 3.12 support, we install libmemcached-dev. This doesn't appear to be documented and we possibly need to document this.
• I think the decision to remove pylibmc is a decision to deprecate PyLibMCCache, this is still used ​quite a bit from what I can tell. I can't imagine that would be a popular decision

Generally, I think this needs quite a lot of input before a decision can be made (and probably a Django forum discussion).
Django 6.0 is due to be released until December so there's quite some time for a release to pylibmc to be issued. Will mark as Someday/Maybe to revisit closer to that date.

[Paolo Melchiorre]

Replying to Sarah Boyce:

• I can see in 19c4052f98e5dc4fe9d7edd7125df6a66efbd79f as part of adding Python 3.12 support, we install libmemcached-dev. This doesn't appear to be documented and we possibly need to document this.

Yes, that's the same advice I gave to Daniele Varrazzo in the psycopg issue: ​https://github.com/psycopg/psycopg/issues/999

• I think the decision to remove pylibmc is a decision to deprecate PyLibMCCache, this is still used ​quite a bit from what I can tell. I can't imagine that would be a popular decision

I can image it, but the project seem abandoned and we remove dependencies in the past after a period of deprecation.

Generally, I think this needs quite a lot of input before a decision can be made (and probably a Django forum discussion).

Ok, I can open a thread in the forum if you think it will help having more feedback on it.

Django 6.0 is due to be released until December so there's quite some time for a release to pylibmc to be issued. Will mark as Someday/Maybe to revisit closer to that date.

I'm a bit pessimistic on that point because Daniele itself opened an issue to request a new pylibmc release compatible with Python 3.12 long time ago without any answer:
​https://github.com/lericson/pylibmc/issues/288