[Web-SIG] WSGI in standard library

[Guido van Rossum]

On 2/14/06, Clark C. Evans <cce at clarkevans.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 12:49:00PM -0800, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> | There are many different ways to judge "production quality". If we're
> | talking about correct, (standards-compliant, even) code, I wholly
> | agree.
>
> Fantastic.  I just don't think it is appropriate to have a "toy"
> in the standard library.

So we disagree fundamentally -- IMO sometimes a toy is right for the
standard library, for example when anything considered a non-toy would
have vast reams of platform-specific code, or when the design space
for non-toys is simply too vast to pick just one solution. The
standard library should only have one of each thing it supports.

Example: I doubt that the standard library will ever contain a non-toy
GUI library or a non-toy web framework. Developing one of these is a
huge effort, and there are serious trade-offs in choosing one. For
example, professionals disagree on whether Django, Cheetah or Myghty
is the best templating language. Until one has "won" (an unlikely
outcome) none of these should be promoted to standard library status,
because it would do a disservice to those users for whom the chosen
one is the wrong choice. So instead, the standard library gets
something like string.Template, which is markedly less powerful, but
also less controversial.

> On Tue, Feb 14, 2006 at 12:00:57PM -0800, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> | Let's make it so. I propose to add wsgiref to the standard library and
> | nothing more.
>
> I propose we add wsgiref, but look at other implementations and
> steal what ever you can from them.  This is not a huge chunk of
> code -- no reason why you can't have the best combination of
> features and correctness.

But it would need to be done *before* it is submitted to the standard
library. What you propose sounds like a big task, while what I'm
proposing is a simple matter of slightly cleaning up a few files and
checkin them in. Also, "stealing whatever you can" might easily be
considered a license for feature bloat, which would be unpythonic.

--
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)