[Python-ideas] Geo coordinates conversion in stdlib

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, Mar 28, 2015 at 12:52 AM, anatoly techtonik <techtonik at gmail.com> wrote:
> Why the wave module is there? Or ioctl module? Are they so widely used?
>
> This process is flawed. If anybody would sponsor the research on popularity
> of stdlib, I believe that math will be excluded from top 50 as well. Will
> stdlib
> without math will still be ok?
>
> The measure to estimate the usefullness of standard library is not in
> download score, but in coverage across different areas. There thousands of
> people downloading stuff from youtube, so should we include youtube-dl
> instead of math?

The criteria for the *removal* from the stdlib would be insanely
tight, compared to the criteria for *addition*. So some modules might
now simply be grandfathered in (I suspect wave is one of them), due to
the shift in ease of grabbing stuff off PyPI. But the math module is
pretty important and fundamental, so it's not going anywhere.

As to youtube-dl, though: Definitely not. No matter how popular it is,
it still fails the criterion of release schedule synchronization - it
needs to be agile enough to update as often as it needs, according to
host site changes, and would be shackled rather badly by inclusion in
the stdlib. (You probably don't want to get it from your OS repo
either.)

But none of this changes the recommendations I made earlier. You need
to *demonstrate*, not simply state, a need; and one of the best ways
to demonstrate support, API stability, usage, etc, is to stick a
package up on PyPI. Not everything needs to be in the stdlib, but if
you're going to argue that something should be, what better way than
by pointing out what it's already doing?

ChrisA