Hi all,

The package `python-spacy` seems to have been broken at least partially by the
recent changes in python tooling. The attached patch is a very short first step
into fixing it. This message doesn't hope to get it accepted but is rather meant
to open the discussion on the topic.

- the first issue is naturally the new required dependencies in `native-inputs`
  mentioned in bdde278dc9c565d8e9d11427c3a670ba86808af5 an visible in many
  python packages commit these past weeks. Surprisingly, I managed to compile
  `python-spacy` by adding only `python-wheel`, without `python-setuptools`.
  What makes both required? Are we sure that both were required in each and
  every python package recently modified?

- the second issue which I can't link with the changes in our tooling is caused
  by two packages which tests have broken: `python-aws-xray-sdk` and
  `python-jose`. First one seems to have a problem in sqlalchemy version (it
  seems to be using too recent a syntax; which is weird considering the fact
  that it uses version 2 and that it used to work — `python-aws-xray-sdk` hasn't
  been modified since cec543e7 on april the 27th 2023!). Second one now has
  trouble checking several certificates for mere formatting reasons (expected
  and actual PEMs are almost the same, only newlines are different; fixing the
  code of the test itself, another one breaks somewhere else. It seems that
  these source codes aren't sturdy enough and don't work at all in the package
  environment guix provides.

- these packages are dependencies of `python-moto`. Removing them from the
  dependencies, many tests break as expected for lack of these modules, but
  disabling them isn't enough: I played a game of whack-a-mole yesterday trying
  to get the tests to pass. Strangely, whereas testing with hypothesis runs all
  the tests and then reports all that have failed, fixing the one reported and
  running the tests again doesn't help: new tests break in different files that
  were apparently fine before… I had three iterations of this process, each one
  consuming half and hour on my machine. As far as I am concerned, these tests
  are unreliable and don't bring any additional confidence to the package. I
  have disabled them to test the fix for `python-spacy` and have been able to
  compile it and use the package.

Appart from that, everything looks ok. `python-moto` appears as a dependency of
`python-smart-open` which itself is both a direct dependency of `python-spacy`
and a dependency of `python-pathy` which is also a dependency of `python-spacy`.

python-smart-open -> python-moto
python-pathy -> python-smart-open
python-spacy -> python-smart-open, python-pathy

I understand that disabling the tests on a package entirely isn't a very sound
practice for a distribution so I doubt this is an acceptable fix. As I
understand the situation the next steps will be to sort things between
`python-aws-xray-sdk` and `python-sqlalchemy` and to understand why the tests in
`python-jose` have suddenly broken so bad.

Best,

Alice