[Python-ideas] Add from __experimental__ import bla [was: Should we move to replace re with regex?]

[Barry Warsaw]

On Aug 30, 2011, at 08:53 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

>TBH the best use case I can think of would actually be the ipaddr
>package, which is somewhat controversial but not overly so, and seems
>to lack a push to ever get it accepted. Putting it in experimental for
>3.3 would let us distribute it with Python without committing 100% to
>the solution it offers over its nearest competitor. However the
>downside is that that's a very long wait, still provides a pretty
>strong bias (unless we were to include both competing packages), and
>still doesn't look like it might get enough beta testing, unless the
>uptake of 3.3 is huge. So maybe we should just count PyPI downloads
>and decide that way. "50,000,000 Elvis fans can't be wrong." (An
>interesting meme by itself. :-)

I think an experimental namespace is actually attacking the wrong problem, or
maybe the right problem in the wrong way. ;)

I'd much prefer to see some brainstorming on multi-version support, which is
something that Robert Collins is always bugging me about.  Something like
pkg_resource's require() function seems like a good place to start.

If we had this built-in, then including ipaddr in the stdlib as it currently
stands would be a no-brainer, even with a suboptimal API.  It would get lots
of testing, and a completely different API could be designed for Python 3.4
without break packages that relied on the old API.  Python's deprecation
policy could be adjusted to include diminishing support for older versions of
a module in the stdlib, and we'd avoid ugliness like unittest2 and such.

-Barry
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