[Python-Dev] Docs of weak stdlib modules should encourage exploration of 3rd-party alternatives

[Guido van Rossum]

On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 2:21 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:16:40 -0700
> Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 12:49 PM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
>> > Authors of separately maintained packages are, from our viewpoint, as
>> > eligible to help with tracker issues as anyone else, even while they
>> > continue work on their external package. Some of them are more likely than
>> > most contributors to have the knowledge needed for some particular issues.
>>
>> This is a good idea. I was chatting w. Senthil this morning about
>> adding improvements to urllib/request.py based upon ideas from
>> urllib3, requests, httplib2 (?), and we came to the conclusion that it
>> might be a good idea to let those packages' authors review the
>> proposed stdlib improvements.
>
> We don't have any provisions against reviewal by third-party
> developers already. I think the main problem (for us, of course) is that
> these people generally aren't interested enough to really dive in
> stdlib patches and proposals.
>
> For example, for the ssl module, I have sometimes tried to involve
> authors of third-party packages such as pyOpenSSL (or, IIRC, M2Crypto),
> but I got very little or no reviewing.

IIRC M2Crypto is currently unmaintained, so that doesn't surprise me.
(In general it seems most crypto wrappers seem unmaintained -- it must
be a thankless job.)

Still, AFAICT both requests and urllib3 are very actively maintained
by people who know what they are doing, and it would be nice if we
could build bridges instead of competition. So let's at least try.
(But I'm not asking you, Antoine, to try and approach them personally.
:-)

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)