[Python-Dev] PEP 408 -- Standard library preview package (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Sat Jan 28 09:55:13 CET 2012

On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 5:49 PM, Matt Joiner <anacrolix at gmail.com> wrote:

FWIW I'm now -1 for this idea. Stronger integration with PyPI and packaging systems is much preferable. Python core public releases are no place for testing.

People saying this: we KNOW this approach doesn't work in all cases. If it worked perfectly, regex would be in the standard library by now.

Don't consider this PEP a purely theoretical proposal, because it isn't. It's really being put forward to solve a specific problem: the fact that we need to do something about re's lack of proper Unicode support [1]. Those issues are actually hard to solve, so replacing re with Matthew Barnett's regex module (just as re itself was a replacement for the original regex module) that already addresses most of them seems like a good way forward, but this is currently being blocked because there are still a few lingering concerns with maintainability and backwards compatibility.

We need to break the impasse preventing its inclusion in the standard library, and preview lets us do that without running roughshod over the legitimate core developer concerns raised in the associated tracker issue [2].

With the current criteria for stdlib inclusion, it doesn't matter if a module is oh-so-close to being accepted: it gets rejected anyway, just like a module that has no chance of ever being suitable. There is currently no path forward for resolving any stdlib-specific concerns that arise with already popular PyPI modules, and so such situations remain unresolved and key components of the standard library stagnate.

While regex is the current poster-child for this problem, it's quite likely that similar problems will arise in the future. Kenneth Reitz's requests module is an obvious candidate: it's enormously popular with users, Kenneth has indicated he's amenable to the idea of stdlib inclusion once the feature set is sufficiently stable (i.e. not for 3.3), but I expect there will be legitimate concerns with incorporating it, given its scope.

Cheers, Nick.

[1] http://bugs.python.org/issue?%40search_text=&ignore=file%3Acontent&title=&%40columns=title&id=&%40columns=id&stage=&creation=&creator=tchrist&activity=&%40columns=activity&%40sort=activity&actor=&nosy=&type=&components=&versions=&dependencies=&assignee=&keywords=&priority=&%40group=priority&status=1&%40columns=status&resolution=&nosy_count=&message_count=&%40pagesize=50&%40startwith=0&%40queryname=&%40old-queryname=&%40action=search

[2] http://bugs.python.org/issue2636

-- Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia

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