[stdlib-sig] should we try to add argparse?

[Paul Moore]

2009/9/11 Laura Creighton <lac at openend.se>:
> That is, actually, pretty much what I want a stdlib for.  I don't want
> it to contain the newest, greatest, and best ways of doing things.  I
> want it to contain the things that people are willing to maintain until
> hell freezes over, which will largely be things that aren't ever going
> to change until hell freezes over.

Hmm, interesting. What *I* want from the stdlib is a readily-available
library of best practice (or at least, sufficiently good and
production-quality) tools covering a wide range of common programming
tasks. In other words, unless I'm doing something specialised, I want
to be able to write code without external dependencies.

Simple examples:

- random uses Mersenne Twister, which is a suitable choice for "most
people". I don't want something like C's rand() (which isn't strong
enough - or wasn't last time I used it...) or Haskell's System.Random
(which provides stronger guarantees which aren't relevant to normal
use, at a performance cost).
- hashlib provides current best practice hash algorithms, implemented
efficiently. I wouldn't want to only have md5 in the stdlib.
- http.server (SimpleHTTPServer) may not be as good as Twisted, but
it's good enough for a simple web interface.

So, while I don't necessarily want "newest, greatest and best", I do
expect "up to date, production quality, and current good practice". If
I wanted unchanging, I wouldn't upgrade my Python installation.

Paul.