[Python-ideas] Moving development out of the standard library

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Mon, 7 Jun 2010 13:33:48 -0500
Ian Bicking <ianb at colorstudy.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 1:14 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 7 Jun 2010 11:35:16 -0500
> > Ian Bicking <ianb at colorstudy.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > I think there is a general consensus that functionality should not be
> > tied
> > > to a Python release, but the results are ad hoc.
> >
> > I disagree with this. Tying new functionality to a Python release
> > vastly simplifies dependency management (instead of having to track the
> > versions of N external libraries, sometimes with inter-dependencies).
> >
> 
> I say there is consensus because as far as I know anything substantial has a
> maintained version outside the standard library; argparse is implicitly,
> unittest is unittest2, ElementTree always has maintained a separate
> existence, simplejson implicitly.

"Anything substantial" is more than exagerated. The modules you are
mentioning are exceptions, two of which may even be temporary (argparse
and unittest2). Most sdtlib modules don't have external releases, and
many of them are still "substantial".

> 1. How will distutils2 updates be made available between Python releases?
> 2. How will distutils2 features be made available in older Python releases?

Why are you expecting any of these to happen? I don't know what Tarek
intends to do in that respect, but he certainly doesn't have any moral
obligation to do external releases.

Regards

Antoine.