[Python-ideas] Defining an easily installable "Recommended baseline package set"

[Nick Coghlan]

On 1 November 2017 at 05:56, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 31, 2017 at 12:24 PM, MRAB <python at mrabarnett.plus.com> wrote:
>
>> At least Python 3.6 is only 1 year/release behind, which is fine!
>>
>
> OK, so presumably that argument doesn't preclude inclusion in the 3.7 (or
> later) stdlib. I'm beginning to warm up to the idea again... Maybe we
> should just bite the bullet. Nick, what do you think? Is it worth a small
> PEP?
>

I'm personally still in favour of swapping out the current _sre based
implementation for a _regex based implementation (such that 3.7+ still only
contained a single regex engine, and the stdlib re module and a PyPI regex
backport module could still happily coexist), and a PEP + draft patch would
be the way to do that.

The framing of a PEP for that approach would be "Replace the regex engine
backing the re module" rather than "Add regex to the standard library". The
existing engine could then potentially be spun out as a new "sre" project
on PyPI, such that folks that *were* depending on _sre internals had access
to an upgrade path that didn't necessarily require them porting their code
to a new regex engine (the PEP author wouldn't have to commit to doing that
work - we'd just ask the PyPI admins to reserve the name in case there
proved to be demand for such a project).

However, I'm also not one of the folks that would be on the hook for
handling any compatibility regressions that were subsequently reported
against the 3.7 re module, so I'd also take my +1 with a rather large grain
of salt - it's easy to be positive about a plan when the potential
downsides don't affect me personally :)

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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