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

[Guido van Rossum]

On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 8:19 AM, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
> 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.

It's a great idea to brainstorm about, just not in this thread. I see
the two issues completely orthogonal.

> 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.

You sound like you have a solution for using multiple versions of an
API in the same program. Do you? Then out with it! Otherwise, no, it
wouldn't be a no-brainer.

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