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

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Fri Feb 10 13:44:14 CET 2012

On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 7:37 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:

Notice that the last time something like this came up (bsddb), it actually resulted in a removal of the respective package from the standard library.

bsddb was a very different case - it was actively causing buildbot stability problems and various reports on the tracker due to changes in the external Berkeley DB API. Once we had sqlite3 in the standard lib as an alternate DB-API backend, it was hard to justify the ongoing maintenance hassles despite Jesus Cea stepping up as the maintainer (and he still maintains the pybsddb version - that was actually a big factor in letting us drop it, since we could just direct current users towards the PyPI version).

Most orphan modules in the stdlib aren't like that - yes, their APIs stagnate (because nobody feels they have the authority and/or expertise to make potentially controversial decisions), but for many of them, that's not a particularly bad thing. For others, the world has moved on around them and they becomes traps for the unwary, but still, taking the modules out is unwarranted, since we'd be breaking code without giving affected users a good alternative (for orphan modules, nobody is likely to take the time to maintain them on PyPI if they weren't willing to do so in the stdlib - this actually stands in stark contrast to the bsddb case, which was decidedly not an orphan module when it was removed).

Regards, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia

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