[stdlib-sig] Breaking out the stdlib

[Jesse Noller]

On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 3:26 PM, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 12:19, Jesse Noller <jnoller at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.
>>
>
> Decoupling in the build system is a good idea and would naturally
> happen if we broke out the standard library in the VCS.

\o/

>> 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".
>
> Because I don't want to have to start telling people "download the
> full Python distribution, not the interpreter-only one; that's only
> for those folk who want to stuff Python on an embedded device." That
> seems silly. And you know some newbie will screw up, download only the
> interpreter version and wonder why he can't import some module. The
> amount of people who are going to screw up on what to download will
> most likely be larger than the people who are going to save some time
> downloading just the interpreter instead of having to tweak something
> for an embedded device.
>
> -Brett
>

What if the font for the "only get dis" is really, really small? Or on
a different "advanced yo" page?

We could put it in the developer's FAQ - no one reads that ;)