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

[Paul Moore]

On 29 October 2017 at 09:51, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> On Sun, 29 Oct 2017 17:54:22 +1000
> Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> This means that
>> if educators aren't teaching them, or redistributors aren't providing them,
>> then they're actively doing their users a disservice
>
> Which redistributors do not provide the requests library, for example?
> regex is probably not as popular (mostly because re is good enough for
> most purposes), but it still appears to be available from Ubuntu and
> Anaconda.

I know it's not what you meant, but "the python.org installers" is the
obvious answer here. On Windows, if you say to someone "install
Python", they get the python.org distribution. Explicitly directing
them to Anaconda is an option, but that gives them a distinctly
different experience than "standard Python plus some best of breed
packages like requests" does.

>> All the proposal does is to suggest taking those existing recommendations
>> from the documentation and converting them into a more readibly executable
>> form.
>
> I'm curious what such a list looks like :-)

I am also. I'd put requests on it immediately, but that's the only
thing I consider obvious. regex is what triggered this, but I'm not
sure it adds *that* much - it's a trade off between people who need
the extra features and people confused over why we have two regex
libraries available. After that, you're almost immediately into
domain-specific answers, and it becomes tricky fast.

Paul