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

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Tue Mar 13 05:22:27 CET 2012

On 3/12/2012 10:23 PM, Andrey Petrov wrote:

I've had the pleasure of speaking with Guido at PyCon and it became evident that some of Python's included batteries are significantly lagging behind the rapidly-evolving defacto standards of the community—specifically in cases like urllib and urllib2, which lack important features provided by alternatives like httplib2, requests, and my own urllib3.

Part 1: I propose we add a snippet to the top of the documentation of specific archaic standard modules which encourages users to investigate third-party alternatives if they find the standard module frustrating or otherwise lacking. These notes would target new users, including those coming from other languages where the third-party library choices are not nearly as amazing as they are in Python.

I would rather we figure out how to encourage authors of advancing packages to contribute better implementations of existing features and well-tested new features back to the stdlib module.

For instance, are you the same 'Andrey Petrov' who is'darkprokoba' on the tracker? As near as I can tell, that user has posted on one issue about free threading and nothing else, in particular, nothing about web protocols. If that is you, why not?

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."

You have every right to work independently. develop alternative modules, and promote them. But suggesting that we denigrate our work to promote yours strikes me as inappropriate. If nothing else, it would discourage rather than encourage more contributions from more people.

Additionally, I would like for us as a community to identify which other standard libraries (cgi? ssl? others?) are candidates for this kind of messaging in the official Python documentation.

To the degree feasible, stdlib modules should be the best possible in the area they cover. Then all who install Python would benefit. Do you disagree? I would like more of the community to help make that happen.

Any messages in the stdlib doc should be about modules that do things intentionally not covered in the stdlib.

-- Terry Jan Reedy

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