[Python-Dev] Sumo (original) (raw)

geremy condra debatem1 at gmail.com
Thu May 27 01:11:27 CEST 2010

On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 3:41 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:

On 26 May 2010 13:46, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

This is not what I'm suggesting at all. The stdlib wouldn't shrink (well, we could dump outdated modules but that's a separate decision). Ah, OK. In that case, I see the argument for a "Sumo" distribution as weak for a different reason - for general use, the standard library is (nearly!) sufficient, and ignoring specialised use cases, there aren't enough generally useful modules to warrant a "Sumo" distribution (you'd essentially be talking about stuff that "nearly made it into the stdlib", and there's not a huge amount of that). Specialised distributions are another matter - I can see a "web stack" distribution comprising your TurboGears example (or should it be Django, or...?). Enthought essentially do that for a "Scientific Python" distribution. There could easily be others. But a general purpose "Sumo" distribution on top of the stdlib? I'm skeptical. (Personally, my "essential extras" are pywin32, cxOracle and that's about it - futures might make it if it doesn't get into the stdlib, but that's about all).

I'm not clear, you seem to be arguing that there's a market for many augmented python distributions but not one. Why not just have one that includes the best from each domain?

I'm genuinely struggling to see how a Sumo distribution ever comes into being under your proposal. There's no evidence that anyone wants it (otherwise it would have been created by now!!)

Everything worth making has already been made?

and until it exists, it's not a plausible "place" to put modules that don't make it into the stdlib.

Of course its implausible to put something somewhere that doesn't exist... until it does.

So (unless I'm missing something) your argument seems to be that if enough good stuff is rejected for stdlib inclusion, this will prompt the people who wanted that stuff included to create a sumo distribution, which addresses the "too many dependencies is bad" argument for inclusion in the stdlib. That sounds like a suspiciously circular argument to me...

I'd say rather that there are a large number of specialized tools which aren't individually popular enough to be included in Python, but which when taken together greatly increase its utility, and that sumo offers a way to provide that additional utility to python's users without forcing python core devs to shoulder the maintenance burden.

Geremy Condra

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