ipaddr looks like a reasonable library from here, but AFAIK it's not widely used outside of google. I don't know if it's reasonable to want some amount public usage before a brand-new API goes into the standard library, but such use is more likely to uncover API flaws or quirks than a PEP.
OTOH, the PEP process *is* the stronger of the two approaches, allowing people to provide explicit opinions even if (and especially if) they dislike the technology entirely (whereas for an external module, they would just ignore it). If they refuse the comment, they can't complain when it gets added to the standard library - they can still chose to ignore it, then, of course (just as many people ignore xml.dom). In the specific case, I'm not worried about timing. Either 2.7 or 3.2 are still a year ahead, which should give people plenty of time to experiment. OTTH, I *like* people to comment strongly on the PEP, in particular if they are authors of competing libraries. It's no surprise that they get emotional when their hard work won't be appropriately honored in the long run - and if they believe there is something wrong with the technology being proposed (rather than just the words used to describe it), they are probably right. I said it before - this is not going to be a fast acceptance path of a library that gets accepted just because GvR works at google. People of competing libraries *could* write competing PEPs if they wanted to see their library incorporated instead - or they can just state that they don't want *this* library to be incorporated for specific technical reasons. Regards, Martin