[Python-Dev] folding cElementTree behind ElementTree in 3.3

[Eli Bendersky]

>> It's not frozen, it's actually maintained.
>
> Indeed, it sounds like the most appropriate course (if we don't hear
> otherwise from Fredrik) may be to just update PEP 360 to acknowledge
> current reality (i.e. the most current release of ElementTree is
> actually the one maintained by Florent in the stdlib).
>
> I'll note that this change isn't *quite* as simple as Eli's
> description earlier in the thread may suggest, though - the test suite
> also needs to be updated to ensure that the Python version is still
> fully exercised without the C acceleration applied.

Sure thing. I suppose similar machinery already exists for things like
pickle / cPickle. I still maintain that it's a simple change :-)

> And such an an
> alteration would definitely be an explicit fork, even though the user
> facing API doesn't change - we're changing the structure of the code
> in a way that means some upstream deltas (if they happen to occur) may
> not apply cleanly.

This is a very minimal delta, however. I think it can even be made
simpler by replacing ElementTree with a facade module that either
imports _elementtree or the Python ElementTree. So the delta vs.
upstream would only be in file placement.

But these are two conflicting discussions - if changes were made in
stdlib *already* that were not propagated upstream, what use is a
clean delta?

Eli