[Python-ideas] doctest

[Eric Snow]

On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 6:54 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> While it's obviously not the ideal, forking orphaned stdlib modules
> and publishing new versions on PyPI can be an *excellent* idea. The
> core development team is generally a fairly conservative bunch, so
> unless a module has a sufficiently active maintainer that feels
> entitled to make API design decisions, our default response to
> proposals is going to be "no". One of the *best* ways to change this
> is to develop a community around an enhanced version of the module -
> one of our reasons for switching to a DVCS for our development was to
> help make it easier for people to extract and merge stdlib updates
> while maintaining their own versions. Then, when you come to
> python-ideas to say "Hey, wouldn't this be a good idea?", it's
> possible to point to the PyPI version and say:
> - people have tried this and liked it
> - I've been maintaining this for a while now and would continue to do
> so for the standard library
>
> Some major (current or planned) updates to the Python 3.3 standard
> library occurred because folks decided the stdlib solutions were not
> in an acceptable state and set out to improve them (specifically, the
> packaging package came from the distutils2 fork, which continues as a
> backport to early Python versions, and MRAB's regex module has been
> approved for addition, although it hasn't actually been incorporated
> yet). In the past, other major additions like argparse came about that
> way.
>
> A few other stdlib modules have backports on PyPI by their respective
> stlib maintainers so we can try out new design concepts *before*
> committing to supporting them in the standard library.
>
> A published version of doctest2 that was designed to be suitable for
> eventual incorporation back into doctest itself (i.e. by maintaining
> backwards compatibility) sounds like it would be quite popular, and
> would route around the fact that enhancing it isn't high on the
> priority list for the current core development team.

Well said, Nick.  That's worth putting in the devguide.

-eric