On Jan 8, 2008 5:15 AM, Fred Drake <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I don't think this is a huge deal for the pickle module, but is more > of an issue for some of the wrappers for external libraries. The > database packages (bsddb, sqlite) come to mind here, but aren't the > only cases where independent releases make sense. We've certainly > seen that including the "xml" package in the standard library was > questionable at best (and the tie to PyXML exacerbated that horribly).
pickle should definitely remain part of the core; it is timed in lots of ways to core datatypes. It is also something that I expect nobody would be thrilled to maintain if it was separate. And there is a lot to say for having a "universal" serialization format; e.g. there have been RPC systems built on top of pickling. I think ctypes falls in the same category, and see it as a happy addition to the core. For things like bsddb I think the argument of release cycles is stronger. In particular bsddb support in the core is painful, the tests often fail, they take a long time to run, and I don't see that many users. For sqlite I'm on the fence; it has saved my butt a few times in situations where having to include an external dependency might have stopped me from using it. And it doesn't seem to be much of a maintenance issue. PyXML was IMO an early mistake; I think it's good to have a certain amount of XML support in the core, and to have more extensive support separate; the blunder was trying to reuse the same toplevel package name. I think the argument of release cycles is very important for reasoning about these kinds of issues; no two cases are alike. -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/) _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
