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

[Steve Dower]

On 05Jul2016 1021, Paul Moore wrote:
> 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.

Also +1 on this - a default install of Python should continue to include 
everything it currently does.

My interest in changing anything at all is to provide options for 
end-users/distributors to either reduce the footprint (which they 
already do), to more quickly update specific modules, and perhaps 
long-term to make user's code be less tied to a particular Python 
version (instead being tied to, for example, a specific asyncio version 
that can be brought into a range of supported Python versions).

Batteries included is a big deal.

Cheers,
Steve