[Python-Dev] Breaking up the stdlib (Was: release cadence)

[Paul Moore]

On 5 July 2016 at 18:02, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
> Yes, we're all probably sick and tired of hearing all the Chicken Little
> scare stories about how the GIL is killing Python, how everyone is
> abandoning Python for Ruby/Javascript/Go/Swift, how Python 3 is killing
> Python, etc. But sometimes the sky does fall. For many people, Python's
> single biggest advantage until now has been "batteries included", and I
> think that changing that is risky and shouldn't be done lightly.

+1

To be fair, I don't think anyone is looking at this "lightly", but I
do think it's easy to underestimate the value of "batteries included",
and the people it's *most* useful for are precisely the people who
aren't involved in any of the Python mailing lists. They just want to
get on with things, and "it came with the language" is a *huge*
selling point.

Internal changes in how we manage the stdlib modules are fine. But
changing what the end user sees as "python" is a much bigger deal.

Paul