Gensim: bz2file dependency considered not neccessary?

[yunhua-deng]

Python has built-in bz2 module (https://docs.python.org/3/library/bz2.html), don't understand why does gensim depend on bz2file which is a old library (see https://pypi.org/project/bz2file/) without updates for a long time. Can I remove this dependency safely?

Installing collected packages: bz2file, jmespath, urllib3, botocore, s3transfer, boto3, smart-open, gensim
  Found existing installation: urllib3 1.24.1
    Uninstalling urllib3-1.24.1:
      Successfully uninstalled urllib3-1.24.1
Successfully installed boto3-1.9.130 botocore-1.12.130 bz2file-0.98 gensim-3.7.2 jmespath-0.9.4 s3transfer-0.2.0 smart-open-1.8.1 urllib3-1.22

[menshikh-iv]

Looks like a possible issue of smart_open, @mpenkov though?

[mpenkov]

Yes, this is an indirect dependency via smart_open. You can safely remove that dependency if:

• You're using Py3, or
• You're not planning on opening .bz2 files with gensim or smart_open