Version without (c)chardet?

[EdLeafe]

I really like using aiohttp for the app I'm developing for work, but the legal team has raised a red flag regarding the use of chardet (or cchardet), as it is LGPL-licensed. I've looked through the source, and see that its only usage is in the get_encoding() method of client_reqrep.py. I tried removing that else: block, and everything runs fine, as we are not processing unknown blocks of text. I saw that you made it a required dependency back in 2015, but the license for it makes the entire aiohttp project not FOSS-compatible.

[Dreamsorcerer]

Maybe it's a good idea to make it work without it, but I'm not sure what the issue is with a LGPL library or how that makes it "not FOSS-compatible" (it's literally a FOSS license).

The only reason I can think of that you would even need to think about doing something extra to comply with the LPGL is if you release a Python app as a complete binary blob including the library, in which case you would need to have a method to allow a user to replace the library in the binary (but you could also just tweak your build process to exclude the library, either by patching aiohttp or by including a dummy version of the library). In the typical case for Python software, where the library is just depended on and pip installed, you would not need to do anything.

[EdLeafe]

Sorry, I meant to write "not FOSS-compatible because we need to release a binary blob". Well, actually, it's the binary blob that is the problem. We have such a substitution method, but it's a bit of a hack, and it would be simpler to just remove chardet, and the legal team here at BIG COMPANY is still uneasy about it.

[Dreamsorcerer]

I'm not sure what other maintainer's thoughts on this are, but my feeling is that the build process can be used to exclude the library. But, maybe we could introduce a try/except thing to not require importing it.

As an immediate solution though, I think the simplest thing to do is to have a custom version of chardet that gets included into the binary instead, which could literally just be an empty __init__.py file. Or, to be a little more thorough:

def detect(*args, **kwargs):
    raise NotImplementedError("Real chardet library not installed")

[Ousret]

Hi there,

Recently, requests maintainers did help toward this. Charset-Normalizer is a viable alternative (MIT licensed). Could provide a smooth transition.
Happy to help.

Regards,

[EdLeafe]

That looks promising - thanks, @Ousret !

[Ousret]

Hi,

In case someone stumbles here, I have proposed a PR for that matter.
#5930

[asvetlov]

Done by aiohttp 3.8.0

[EdLeafe]

Great! Thanks to all for a great product!

[asvetlov]

Thank you!