[stdlib-sig] Breaking out the stdlib

[Antoine Pitrou]

Le lundi 14 septembre 2009 à 11:13 -0400, Jesse Noller a écrit :
> Note, since I drafted this, brett's posted some thought on evolution
> as well: http://sayspy.blogspot.com/2009/09/evolving-standard-library.html

I tried to comment on it but, after a lot of pain editing my thoughts
(the text editor on that blog is completely broken in my browser), it
seems the comment got lost when I clicked "post"...

> In thinking about this even more over the past year(ish) - I've
> wondered if the stdlib, and python-core should actually be *really*
> separated. I'm a huge fan of batteries included, but I can see the
> draw to a breakdown like this:
> 
> python-core (no stdlib, interpreter, core language)
> python-stdlib (no core)

Note, however, that an interpreter without stdlib is useless. Even basic
I/O (on Python 3) may not function properly. Conversely, the stdlib will
depend on certain interpreter features, or even implementation details.
So, while we can put them in separate VCSes, the development of
python-core and python-stdlib will be still be quite tied.

> python-full (the works)

What is this? core + stdlib?

> From a packaging standpoint -
> it's a lot easier to spin a new stdlib package and get it into an OS
> upstream then the entire interpreter.

I'm not convinced. A new stdlib can lead to as many compatibility
problems as a new interpreter does. And it seems that compatibility /
dependency management is the #1 problem in packaging.

> I would personally like to see every single stdlib library have an
> "owner" - I know, that's a long shot, but I really feel it's needed.
> Otherwise you potentially have people reviewing patches for code they
> may not fully understand, or not understand the ramifications of.

On the other hand, having an owner can be detrimental to maintenance.
For example, nobody wants to touch ElementTree except Fredrik, and
Fredrik isn't very active these days.
We should also say to no to externally-maintained modules, because it
completely ruins maintenance for us core developers.