[Python-Dev] Docs of weak stdlib modules should encourage exploration of 3rd-party alternatives (original) (raw)

Brian Curtin brian at python.org
Tue Mar 13 04:58:12 CET 2012

On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 19:23, Andrey Petrov <shazow at gmail.com> wrote:

What such a snippet might look like:

"Batteries are included with Python but sometimes they are old and leaky—this is one of those cases. Please have a look in PyPI for more modern alternatives provided by the Python community."

What does "leaky" mean here? Someone's going to see that, think it has memory leaks, then rant on the internet about how we ship crap and just document it as so.

Part 2: I propose we add a new category of package identifiers such as "Topic :: Standard Library Alternative :: {stdlibpackagename}" which authors of libraries can tag themselves under. The documentation warning snippet will provide a link to the appropriate PyPI query to list packages claiming to be alternatives to the stdlib package in question.

Automating it to something on PyPI is the not the right answer. People will use it incorrectly, either in that they'll add it to packages for which it isn't accurate, and people just flat out won't use it or know about it. It won't be accurate this way, and anything that we're documenting needs to be vetted.

It's not often that a great alternative comes up, so I don't see the manual burden being too great.

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