Andrew Barnert via Python-ideas writes:
However, I think that a macaddress library could easily be one of the few things that does properly fit in the networking section of the stdlib. It’s a small feature, and it should be very stable—I think the last change to the protocol spec was about 20 years ago, and from a brief scan of the release notes for netaddr it looks like for the last decade its needed less than one bugfix or feature per year for dealing with MAC/EUI addresses…
I wonder if it should go in a package of its own, or if we should expand ipaddress to netaddress and have all the features at the same level, or if we should have ipaddress.macaddress (the semantics there are a bit wonky, but "ipaddress" is now canonical for the ipaddress features). From the Old Farts Must Reminisce Department:
But if the stdlib were designed from scratch today rather than over the past 30 years, I think it would have less than it does, not more. Up to around a decade ago, installing third-party libraries was a huge mess, but nowadays, PyPI works, Python comes with pip pre-installed, and telling developers they need internet access when they first start a new project isn’t considered onerous.
That's OK for developers on their "own" machines, but I think there are still a lot of folks who need approval from corporate (though I haven't heard from Paul Moore on that theme in quite a while, maybe it's gotten better?) But for those not constrained by corporate policy, even if they don't have good network access consistently, installing everything you think you might ever need from PyPI on the infrequent occasions you do have such access is only a small fraction of modern disks. Suboptimal, of course, but there was a time I typed the bootstrap assembly code for a C compiler from a book, and then did the optimized full-featured self-hosting version the same way. Not saying "you kidz these dayz don't know how good you have it", rather "where there's a will there's a way." $python -m pip + PyPI makes TOOWTDI for packages quite painless! Steve