[stdlib-sig] Breaking out the stdlib

[Jesse Noller]

On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 3:11 PM, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 11:56, Jesse Noller <jnoller at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 2:54 PM, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
>>> On Sep 14, 2009, at 11:35 AM, Paul Moore wrote:
>>>
>>>> Please remember that some establishments have restrictions that mean
>>>> that tools like easy_install or pip cannot be used. In locked-down
>>>> corporate environments, python-full is potentially all that will be
>>>> available (and maybe very specific "blessed" environment-specific 3rd
>>>> party modules).
>>>
>>> Splitting things out for developers is not the same as keeping that split
>>> visible for distributions, either via tarball, binary from us, or through
>>> distros.  In fact, I'd venture to guess that most locked down establishments
>>> are not going to be installing Python from us; they'll get it through their
>>> operating system vendor (well, thank goodness I don't have to know what
>>> locked down Windows users have to go through ;).
>>>
>>> Still, there's no reason why we couldn't ship sumo packages with all those
>>> batteries included again.
>>>
>>> -Barry
>>
>> Yup; that was spelled out in the OP - I would like: core, stdlib,
>> everything as 3 packages. 99% of people will download the 3rd.
>
> Just to toss in my opinion, I think the standard library should be
> broken out in the VCS to make it very obvious what all Python VMs
> should come with and work with, but I don't think we should package it
> up for distribution separately. CPython should probably shift to
> having a slightly less stranglehold on the standard library than it
> has now. This would also help legitimize the other VMs.
>
> But I see no benefit for the general populace in having a version of
> Python w/o a standard library. Anyone who has funky space requirements
> can just do the leg work needed prune down the standard library to
> what they need.
>
> -Brett
>

Yeah: Except for those people that means custom compiling an
interpreter too. The tight coupling is just painful. When I want to
trim the standard library, I should not have to hack the build
scripts, compile an interpreter, etc, etc.

I'm really strongly (duh) for massive decoupling between the two,
especially within the build system.

How is there any harm in offering 3 downloads? The obvious thing is to
click on the big "get some pythons on" button which gets what we know
as python today.

Then there are two little buttons: get "just this" or "just that".