[Python-Dev] we will probably be having an difficult discussion about the stdlib after PEP 594 is done (original) (raw)

Ben Cail benjamin_cail at brown.edu
Fri May 24 10:49:36 EDT 2019

First, thanks to all the python core devs (and others) who work on Python - many, many people (myself included) benefit from your work. Suggestion below...

On 5/23/19 9:02 PM, Barry Warsaw wrote:

On May 23, 2019, at 14:17, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:

I'm personally viewing it as a first step in addressing the maintenance burden we have with such a large stdlib. Christian started this work over a year ago and I think it's worth seeing through. After that we should probably have a discussion as a team about how we view the stdlib long-term and how that ties into maintaining it so that people's opinion of the stdlib's quality goes up rather than viewing the quality of it as varying module-to-module. +1 :)

Why not have the PSF hire someone (or multiple people) to be paid to work on the maintenance burden? This could be similar to the Django fellows: https://www.djangoproject.com/fundraising/#who-is-the-django-fellow. It seems like a good thing for Django, and Python is used by many more people than Django. Why not pay someone to do the work that others don't want to do? The person in this position could be guided by the PSF and/or the Steering Council, to do the work most necessary for the good of the language as a whole (like maintaining old modules that other core devs don't want to work on).

You could market it together with the maintenance burden: "you want to use all these old modules, but we don't want to maintain them. So pay us some money, and we'll hire someone to maintain them."

If this idea has already been discussed in this context and rejected, could it be added to the PEP, with the reasons why it won't work?

Thanks again for your work.

-Ben

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