[Python-Dev] Integrate BeautifulSoup into stdlib?

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> Perhaps we could encourage more "jumbo" distributions, like Enthought's
> and ActiveState's. I suspect many people would rather be able to
> maintain their Python functionality as a single product.

I think the concept of "jumbo distribution" has been lost. I mentioned
it to one of the Enthought people (sorry, forgot who exactly), and he
said he had never heard the term.

Looking back, it seems that you have to be a commercial enterprise to
produce such a thing. There is the python.org distribution, where many
volunteers maintain it, and then there are the two (?) free-commercial
distributions (ActivePython, and EPD). I'm skeptical that there can be
motivation for creating another "community" jumbo distribution - why
would anybody put efforts into maintaining it? You don't get much credit
for release engineering - except from fellow release engineers.

In addition, you have the Linux distributions, which you can also count
as jumbo Python distributions (and also jumbo Perl, jumbo Java, jumbo
LISP - at least for Debian :-). Again, many of these are commercially
based, although there still seems to be space for multiple community
distributions (Debian, Gentoo).

This is precisely the reason why I want Python to continue including its
batteries. If we give that up, it will not come back, and users get
frustrated that they have to collect stuff from many places, and that
the stuff doesn't fit together completely.

What that means for BeautifulSoup, I don't know. First, its authors
would have to offer contributing it, and then experts should also
agree that this would be a useful inclusion. Some apparently say that
html5lib would be a better choice. If that's the thing that is currently
on release 0.11, then I think we should take no action at this point -
I don't want to include anything that has version 0.11.

Regards,
Martin