Thrashing out details should go on the workflow SIG, and I guess I'm the obvious candidate to push it asking. But given my own time constraints right now, I'm not going to dive into details if the high level concept (stdlib packages can be individually updated by end users apart from a full CPython release) is at issue.

Once there seems to be general agreement that this is a worthy goal, I'll see if I can put down details for how I would implement it. (And go join the core-workflow list, I guess :) )

Top-posted from my Windows Phone

From: Paul Moore
Sent: ‎7/‎6/‎2016 7:10
To: Steve Dower
Cc: Petr Viktorin; Python-Dev
Subject: Re: [Python-Dev] Breaking up the stdlib (Was: release cadence)

On 6 July 2016 at 14:55, Steve Dower <steve.dower@python.org> wrote:
> I think the wsgiref issue was that it wasn't in site-packages and so
> couldn't be removed or upgraded. Having the dist-info available and putting
> them in site-packages (or a new directory?) lets us handle
> querying/replacing/removing using the existing tools we use for
> distribution.

That's the one. Thanks for the reminder. So either we move the stdlib
(or parts of it) into site-packages, or pip needs to learn to handle a
versioned stdlib. Cool.

> Also, I think the version numbers do need to be independent of Python
> version in case nothing changes between releases. If you develop something
> using statistics==3.7, but statistics==3.6 is identical, how do you know you
> can put the lower constraint? Alternatively, if it's statistics==1.0 in
> both, people won't assume it has anything to do with the Python version.

This boils down to whether we want to present the stdlib as a unified
object tied to the Python release, or a set of modules no different
from those on PyPI, that happen to be shipped with Python. I prefer
the former view (it matches better how I think of "batteries
included") whereas it looks like you prefer the latter (but don't see
that as being in conflict with "batteries included"). Debating this in
the abstract is probably not productive, so let's wait for a concrete
PEP to thrash out details like this.

Paul