[stdlib-sig] Breaking out the stdlib

[Georg Brandl]

Antoine Pitrou schrieb:
> Le mardi 15 septembre 2009 à 12:03 -0400, Collin Winter a écrit :
>> 
>> Did you read what Laura wrote about her experience with optparse?
>> [...]
> 
> Sure I did. These are still fringe use cases compared to the common uses
> of an option parser. Perhaps argparse has a couple of nifty features
> that make things slightly easier in the common cases, but the difference
> doesn't seem earth-shattering to me.
> 
> The point is, optparse does useful things and it does them reasonably
> well. You can't deny that, and talking about how that other library does
> many other things is not a satisfying answer to the people whose code
> you're gonna break.

Of course it does them reasonably well.  But for most of these "common"
use cases you talk about above, a replacement library will be able to
offer the same or a very similar API, so the breakage is not much worse
than with md5/hashlib.

>> It's also worth noting that optparse continues to have bugs filed
>> against it, so it is not perfect or low-maintenance in that respect:
>> http://bugs.python.org/issue2931 is an interesting example.
> 
> Well, of course it has bugs filed against it (which software hasn't?).
> The point is that there are few of them.
> And, yes, being more unicode-compliant would be nice (although the bug
> should be retried on py3k, because this whole discussion probably
> targets 3.x anyway, not 2.x).

I wouldn't say it has few bugs filed against it; sadly I have no hard data,
but since I read each new tracker item (or at least the title), I would say
that there are many modules that have fewer bugs filed than optparse.

Of course, this also is correlated with the module's size (it's currently
the 12th largest single module in trunk/Lib).

Georg


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