[Python-ideas] Increasing public package discoverability (was: Adding jsonschema to the standard library)

[Andrew Barnert]

On May 27, 2015, at 12:13, Demian Brecht <demianbrecht at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> The major advantage of going with a fully distributed model would be the out-of-band releases. While nice to have for feature development, it can be crucial for bug fixes, but even more so for security patches. Other than that, I could see it opening the door to adoption of packages as “recommended” without worrying too much about state of development. requests is a perfect example of that. Note that my personal focus on standard library development is the http package so I’m somewhat cutting my legs out from under me, but I’m starting to think that adopting such a distribution mechanism might solve a number of problems (but is probably just as likely to introduce new ones ;)).

One way to do that might be to focus the stdlib on picking the abstract interfaces (whether in the actual code, like dbm allows bsddb to plug in, or just in documentation, like DB-API 2) and providing a bare-bones implementation or none at all. It would be nice if things like lxml.etree didn't take so much work and it weren't so hard to quantify how perfect of a replacement it is. Or if we had a SortedMapping ABC so the half-dozen popular implementations could share a consistent API, so they could compete more cleanly on things that matter like performance or the need for a C extension.

But the example of requests shows how hard, and possibly undesirable, that is. Most people use requests not because of the advanced features it has that urllib doesn't, but because the intermediate-level features that both include have a nicer interface in requests. And, while people have talked about how nice it would be to restructure urllib so that it matches requests' interface wherever possible (while still retaining the existing interface for backward compat), it doesn't seem that likely anyone will actually ever do it. And, even if someone did, and requests became a drop-in replacement for urllib' new-style API and urllib was eventually deprecated, what are the odds competitors like PyCurl would be reworked into a "URL-API 2.0" module?