[Python-Dev] Status of json (simplejson) in cpython (original) (raw)

Bob Ippolito bob at redivi.com
Sat Apr 16 18:11:15 CEST 2011

On Saturday, April 16, 2011, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

Le samedi 16 avril 2011 à 17:07 +0200, Xavier Morel a écrit :

On 2011-04-16, at 16:52 , Antoine Pitrou wrote: > Le samedi 16 avril 2011 à 16:42 +0200, Dirkjan Ochtman a écrit : >> On Sat, Apr 16, 2011 at 16:19, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote: >>> What you're proposing doesn't address the question of who is going to >>> do the ongoing maintenance. Bob apparently isn't interested in >>> maintaining stdlib code, and python-dev members aren't interested in >>> maintaining simplejson (assuming it would be at all possible). Since >>> both groups of people want to work on separate codebases, I don't see >>> how sharing a single codebase would be possible. >> >> From reading this thread, it seems to me like the proposal is that Bob >> maintains a simplejson for both 2.x and 3.x and that the current >> stdlib json is replaced by a (trivially changed) version of >> simplejson. > > The thing is, we want to bring our own changes to the json module and > its tests (and have already done so, although some have been backported > to simplejson).

Depending on what those changes are, would it not be possible to apply the vast majority of them to simplejson itself? Sure, but the thing is, I don't think we are interested in backporting stuff to simplejson much more than Bob is interested in porting stuff to the json module.

I've backported every useful patch (for 2.x) I noticed from json to simplejson. Would be happy to apply any that I missed if anyone can point these out.

I've contributed a couple of patches myself after they were integrated to CPython (they are part of the performance improvements Bob is talking about), but that was exceptional. Backporting a patch to another project with a different directory structure, a slightly different code, etc. is tedious and not very rewarding for us Python core developers, while we could do other work on our limited free time.

That's exactly why I am not interested in stdlib maintenance myself, I only use 2.x and that's frozen... so I can't maintain the version we would actually use.

Also, some types of work would be tedious to backport, for example if we refactor the tests to test both the C and Python implementations.

simplejson's test suite has tested both for quite some time.

Furthermore, now that python uses Mercurial, it should be possible (or even easy) to use a versioned queue (via MQ) for the trivial adaptation, and the temporary alterations (things which will likely be merged back into simplejson but are not yet, stuff like that) should it not? Perhaps, perhaps not. That would require someone motivated to put it in place, ensure that it doesn't get in the way, document it, etc. Honestly, I don't think maintaining a single stdlib module should require such an amount of logistics.

It certainly shouldn't, especially because neither of them changes very fast.

-bob

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