At 03:17 PM 6/6/2005 -0700, Bob Ippolito wrote: >Personally I'd like to see the standard library get smaller rather >than larger. There's a whole lot of bit rot in there, and since >sys.path prefers the standard library over anything else it's a >really huge pain to integrate patches on a faster release schedule >than Python's while remaining sane at the same time.
You know, before you said that, it hadn't occurred to me that the Python standard library is subject to the same economic forces that cause mega-packages like Twisted, SciPy, Zope, etc. to develop. Specifically, the cost incurred by relying on an externally-distributed dependency causes anyone with non-trivial needs to create "batteries included" libraries. One of my goals for Python Eggs and EasyInstall was to lower this dependency-cost barrier by reducing the "dependency cost" to zero at the point of installation, by making it as easy to install ten packages as one. (Another was to reduce the dependency cost for the developer, who need only add package metadata for the dependency to be fulfilled at installation time.) Now that you've pointed out the parallel between the stdlib and the other modules, I wonder if Python 3.0 might be able to take a more minimalist approach to the standard library, if it included the equivalents of easy_install and pkg_resources. _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
