[Python-Dev] folding cElementTree behind ElementTree in 3.3 (original) (raw)

Eli Bendersky eliben at gmail.com
Wed Feb 8 05:46:46 CET 2012

On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 06:41, Fred Drake <fdrake at acm.org> wrote:

On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 11:31 PM, Eli Bendersky <eliben at gmail.com> wrote:

Besides, in http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2011-December/114812.html Stefan Behnel said "[...] Today, ET is only being maintained in the stdlib by Florent Xicluna [...]". Is this not true? I don't know.  I took this to be an observation rather than a declaration of intent by the package owner (Fredrik Lundh).

P.S. Would declaring that xml.etree is now independently maintained by pydev be a bad thing? Why? So long as Fredrik owns the package, I think forking it for the standard library would be a bad thing, though not for technical reasons.  Fredrik provided his libraries for the standard library in good faith, and we still list him as the external maintainer.  Until that changes, forking would be inappropriate.  I'd much rather see a discussion with Fredrik about the future maintenance plan for ElementTree and cElementTree.

Yes, I realize this is a loaded issue and I agree that all steps in this direction should be taken with Fredrik's agreement.

However, to re-focus: The initial proposal of changing the stdlib import facade for xml.etree.ElementTree to use the C accelerator (_elementtree) by default. Will that somehow harm Fredrik's sovereignty over ET? Are there any other problems hidden here? Because if not, it appears like a change of only a few lines of code could provide a significantly better XML processing experience in 3.3 for a lot of users (and save some keystrokes for the ones who already know to look for cElementTree).

Eli

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