Remove `--find-links` in `pip freeze`

[xavfernandez]

What's the problem this feature will solve?

pip freeze --find-links=somewhere will simply output -f somewhere at the beginning of the output:

pip/src/pip/_internal/operations/freeze.py

Lines 59 to 62 in 8ae1bd6

	find_links = find_links or []
	for link in find_links:
	yield '-f {}'.format(link)

Except for history (this option exists since the freeze command and 3d32c19), there is no reason to special case it and not allow --index-url, --pre and all the other options allowed in a requirements file.

Describe the solution you'd like

Deprecate and remove it.

Alternative Solutions

Keep it.

Additional context

Deprecating it would ease the transition for #7157

[pradyunsg]

Re-opening and re-titled to track the actual removal. :)

[jaap3]

I have a server that has a pip.conf file with the following:

[global]
find-links = /opt/wheels

Running pip freeze on this server now prints a warning with a reference to this ticket. I'm not sure if that's the intended result as I'm not directly passing the flag to pip freeze, it just happens to be configured globally.

[uranusjr]

The main reason behind the warning is to raise awareness that the -f line would go away once we remove the option entirely. If you don’t actually rely on this behaviour, you can safely ignore the warning. But we don’t know whether someone specifying find-links in config files (or environment variables) is relying on it having an effect on pip freeze, so we need to show the warning anyway to let you decide whether to take further actions.

[xavfernandez]

Exactly.
A workaround for you would be to configure this configuration key on the targeted commands instead of globally.

[install]
find-links = /opt/wheels

[download]
find-links = /opt/wheels

[wheel]
find-links = /opt/wheels

[jaap3]

No worries, the -f line in the pip freeze output has slightly bothered me for a while so I'm glad it's going away :)