[Python-Dev] folding cElementTree behind ElementTree in 3.3

[Nick Coghlan]

On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 1:59 PM, Eli Bendersky <eliben at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is there a good reason why xml.etree.ElementTree /
> xml.etree.cElementTree did not "receive this treatment"?

See PEP 360, which lists "Externally Maintained Packages". In the past
we allowed additions to the standard library without requiring that
the standard library version become the master version. These days we
expect python.org to become the master version, perhaps with backports
and experimental features published on PyPI (cf. packaging vs
distutils2, unittest vs unittest, contextlib vs contextlib2).

ElementTree was one of the last of those externally maintained modules
added to the standard library - as documented in the PEP, it's still
officially maintained by Fredrik Lundh. Folding the two
implementations together in the standard library would mean officially
declaring that xml.etree is now an independently maintained fork of
Fredrik's version rather than just a "snapshot in time" of a
particular version (which is what it has been historically).

So the reasons for keeping these two separate to date isn't technical,
it's because Fredrik publishes them as separate modules.

Regards,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia