[Python-Dev] Thoughts on stdlib evolvement
Martijn Faassen
faassen at infrae.com
Thu Jun 16 12:49:44 CEST 2005
Fredrik Lundh wrote:
[snip]
> in my experience, any external library that supports more than one
> Python version on more than one platform is likely to be more robust
> than code in the core. add the multilevel volunteer approach de-
> described by Steven (with the right infrastructure, things like that
> just appear), and you get more competent manpower contributing
> to the standard distribution than you can get in any other way.
In this context PEP 2 might be useful to look at again:
http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0002.html
It separates between library integrators (into the Python standard
library) and library maintainers, and tries to ensure maintenance
happens on a continuing basis.
A multi-level setup to develop the Python standard library could take
other forms, of course. I sometimes feel the Python-dev community is
more focused on the development of the interpreter than of the library,
and that this priority tends to be reversed outside the Python-dev
community. So, it might be nice if the Python standard library
development integrators and maintainers could be more separate from the
Python core developers. A python-library-dev, say.
Then again, this shouldn't result in large changes in the standard
library, as old things should continue to work for the forseeable
future. So for larger reorganizations and refactorings, such development
should likely take place entirely outside the scope of the core
distribution, at least for the time being.
Finally, I haven't really seen much in the way of effort by developers
to actually do such a large-scale cleanup. Nobody seems to have stepped
up, taking the standard library, and made it undergo a radical
refactoring (and just releasing it separately). That this hasn't
happened seems to indicate the priority is not very high in the mind of
people, so the problem might not be high either. :)
Regards,
Martijn
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