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On 3/13/2012 6:31 AM, Paul Moore wrote:It can be very hard to separate the good from the indifferent (or even bad) when browsing PyPI. I've found some very good packages recently which I'd never have known about without some random comment on a mailing list.
+1
However, I'm not keen on having the stdlib documentation suggest that I should be using something else. No code should ever be documenting "don't use me, there are better alternatives" unless it is deprecated or obsolete.
+0
On the other hand, I would love to see a community-maintained document that described packages that are acknowledged as "best of breed". That applies whether or not those packages replace something in the stdlib. Things like pywin32, lxml, and requests would be examples in my experience.
+1
There's no reason this \*has\* to be in the core documentation - it may be relevant that nothing has sprung up independently yet...
Hmm.
Maybe a separate item in the Python documentation, "External Modules", could be created and maintained by the community? By being in the documentation, it has a level of "official recommendation" status, and by being a top-level document it's visible (more so than, for example, a HOWTO document would be). Because it's in the released documentation, it is relatively stable, which implies that external modules would need to have a genuine track record to get in there, but because it's community maintained it should reflect a wider consensus than just the core developers' views.
+1 This is the best proposal I've seen for including references to external modules. It gets it in the core documentation, hopefully with enough keywords that search would typically find external modules that are supersets of stdlib modules in the same result set that the stdlib module would be found. Yet it doesn't intrude on the documentation for the stdlib module. And beyond a 1-2 paragraph description, would not be fully documented, except by referencing the external module's documentation.