[Python-Dev] Dropping externally maintained packages (Was: Please stop changing wsgiref on the trunk)

[Greg Ward]

[Guido]
> While I am an enthusiastic supporter of several of those additions, I
> am *not* in favor of the special status granted to software
> contributed by certain developers, since it is a burden for all other
> developers.

[Martin]
> Each maintainer should indicate whether he is happy with a "this is
> part of Python" approach. If so, the entry should be removed from PEP
> 360 (*); if not, the code should be removed from Python before beta 1.

I very much identify with Phillip's gripe, but I gotta admit Guido has
the compelling argument here.  Personally, I have noticed very few
"rogue" changes to optparse.py over the years, and have quietly grumbled
and backported most of them over to Optik for eventual re-merge to
optparse.  (One or two got dropped because I had already fixed the
problem differently in Optik.)

I think this is just the price that must be paid for maintaining two
copies of something.  It's nice that Optik has an existence of its own
(every time I break compatibility with Python 2.0, someone comes along
with a patch to restore it), but I think it's better that the burden of
keeping track of what is effectively a closely-tracked fork should be on
the person who knows the code best (me), not on a horde of Python
developers who may occasionally stumble across a style issue or shallowf
bug and just fix it.

In retrospect, I'm *really* glad that I didn't release textwrap
separately, and just stuffed it in the stdlib.  And while I have been
thinking about Optik 2.0 for a couple of years now, I think that I have
just decided that there will be no Optik 2.0: there will only be
optparse2.  (Unless I can figure out a backwards-compatible way of
making the changes I've been thinking about all these years, in which
case there will only be optparse.  Unlikely.)

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward <gward at python.net>                         http://www.gerg.ca/
Reality is for people who can't handle science fiction.