So basically, yet another Linux distribution that completely inaccurately modifies calibre in order to strip out dependencies, but cannot even do it correctly.
calibre's internal Beautifulsoup.py was a fork of Beautifulsoup3 which changed some things for reasons I don't know and didn't keep track of, but like the other handful of vendored libraries, this can generally be assumed to have been:
- a legacy of calibre's venerable development history, AND
- something which did not work upstream, which was either not upstreamable OR upstream was dead and therefore could not accept anything
So instead of working with upstream to try to get this resolved, and instead of respecting the wishes of upstream, they chose to strip it out anyway. I do not do this in my Arch Linux package!
Then, once I do in fact work with upstream to get this properly resolved (by migrating to stock bs4), their completely incorrect downstream modifications no longer work, because the API wrapper interface which they have always broken for News recipes, is also now generally broken for everything that is using the new calibre/ebooks/Beautifulsoup.py which is a *wrapper* for bs4.
Tell Gentoo to stop removing this, and next time they want to patch something out they should use a .patch which will stop cleanly applying if the code they are patching has changed in the meantime.
Also, while you are at it, tell them to stop using the Debian project's filthy lying patch which removes the plugin downloader for totally illegitimate reasons.
(Apparently some vaporware standard which died in 2009 is the only technology which Gentoo will allow for users to interactively download plugins from a centralized HTTPS server. Gag me.)