On 3 July 2016 at 22:04, Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> wrote:
> This last bit is what I would advocate if we broke the stdlib out unless an
> emergency patch release is warranted for a specific module (e.g. like
> asyncio that started this discussion). Obviously backporting is its own
> thing.
It's also worth noting that pip has no mechanism for installing an
updated stdlib module, as everything goes into site-packages, and the
stdlib takes precedence over site-packages unless you get into
sys.path hacking abominations like setuptools uses (or at least used
to use, I don't know if it still does). So as things stand,
independent patch releases of stdlib modules would need to be manually
copied into place.
I thought I mentioned this depends on changing sys.path; sorry if I didn't.
Allowing users to override the stdlib opens up a different can of
worms - not necessarily one that we couldn't resolve, but IIRC, it was
always a deliberate policy that overriding the stdlib wasn't possible
(that's why backports have names like unittest2...)
I think it could be considered less of an issue now thanks to being able to declare dependencies and the version requirements for pip.
-brett