[Python-Dev] Dropping externally maintained packages (Was: Please stop changing wsgiref on the trunk) (original) (raw)

Greg Ward gward-1337f07a94b43060ff5c1ea922ed93d6 at python.net
Tue Jun 13 04:29:35 CEST 2006

[Guido]

While I am an enthusiastic supporter of several of those additions, I am not in favor of the special status granted to software contributed by certain developers, since it is a burden for all other developers.

[Martin]

Each maintainer should indicate whether he is happy with a "this is part of Python" approach. If so, the entry should be removed from PEP 360 (*); if not, the code should be removed from Python before beta 1.

I very much identify with Phillip's gripe, but I gotta admit Guido has the compelling argument here. Personally, I have noticed very few "rogue" changes to optparse.py over the years, and have quietly grumbled and backported most of them over to Optik for eventual re-merge to optparse. (One or two got dropped because I had already fixed the problem differently in Optik.)

I think this is just the price that must be paid for maintaining two copies of something. It's nice that Optik has an existence of its own (every time I break compatibility with Python 2.0, someone comes along with a patch to restore it), but I think it's better that the burden of keeping track of what is effectively a closely-tracked fork should be on the person who knows the code best (me), not on a horde of Python developers who may occasionally stumble across a style issue or shallowf bug and just fix it.

In retrospect, I'm really glad that I didn't release textwrap separately, and just stuffed it in the stdlib. And while I have been thinking about Optik 2.0 for a couple of years now, I think that I have just decided that there will be no Optik 2.0: there will only be optparse2. (Unless I can figure out a backwards-compatible way of making the changes I've been thinking about all these years, in which case there will only be optparse. Unlikely.)

    Greg

-- Greg Ward <gward at python.net> http://www.gerg.ca/ Reality is for people who can't handle science fiction.

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list