[stdlib-sig] Breaking out the stdlib

[Georg Brandl]

Antoine Pitrou schrieb:
> Le mardi 15 septembre 2009 à 21:51 +0200, Georg Brandl a écrit :
>> 
>> 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.
> 
> Well I do think that md5 shouldn't have been deprecated in 2.x. AFAIU,
> it was easy to continue supporting it (by creating a simple stub);
> annoying users wasn't worth what we gained in maintenance, IMO.
> 
> But regardless, this is not the same situation. Migrating from md5 to
> hashlib is simply changing an import line and a module name. Migrating
> from optparse to argparse involves an API change.

Maybe. (I don't know argparse.)  But I can imagine that providing a simple
compatibility API that supports creating OptionParsers and calling
add_option() and parse() on them would be easy if not trivial, and that's
what most users of optparse use.

>> 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).
> 
> It is also correlated with the module's usefulness. Parsing command line
> options is certainly much more common than, say, normalizing unicode
> strings or adding fractions together.

This is true, but it doesn't make the bugs less or less important, but
potentially even more important.  Endly, that results either in more work
or in dissatisfied users.

cheers,
Georg

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