On 6/12/06, Giovanni Bajo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Guido van Rossum wrote: > > >>> I personally think that, going forward, external maintainers should > >>> not be granted privileges such as are being granted by PEP 360, and > >>> an inclusion of a package in the Python tree should be considered a > >>> "fork" for all practical purposes. If an external developer is not > >>> okay with such an arrangement, they shouldn't contribute. > >> > >> This is going to make it tougher to get good contributions, where > >> "good" means "has existing users and a maintainer committed to > >> supporting them". > > > > To which I say, "fine". From the Python core maintainers' POV, more > > standard library code is just more of a maintenance burden. Maybe we > > should get serious about slimming down the core distribution and > > having a separate group of people maintain sumo bundles containing > > Python and lots of other stuff. > > -1000. > > One of the biggest Python strength, and one that I personally rely on a lot, > is the large *standard* library. It means that you can write scripts and > programs that will run on any Python installation out there, no matter how > many eggs were downloaded before, no matter whether the Internet connection > is available or not, no matter if the user has privileges to install > extensions, even if the SourceForge mirror is down, even if SourceForge > changed their HTML and now the magic code can't grok it anymore, etc etc > etc. > > If Python were to lose this standard library in favor of several different > distributions, users could not sensibly write a program anymore without > incurring the risk of using packages not available to some users. Perl has > this problem with CPAN, and system administrators going through hoops to > write admin scripts which do not rely on any external package just because > you can't be sure if a package is installed or not; this leads to code > duplication (duplication of the code included in an external package, but > which can't be "reliably" used), and to bugs (since the local copy of the > functionality can surely be more buggy than the widespread implementation of > the external package). > > Let's not get into this mess, please. I think we just need a smoother way to > maintain the standard library, not an agreement to remove it, just because > we cannot find a way to maintain it properly. The fact that there hundreds > of unreviewed patches to the standard library made by wannabe contributors > is a blatant sign that something *can* be improved.
I'm with you, actually; developers contributing code without wanting to give up control are the problem. You should go talk to those contributors. -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/) _______________________________________________ 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
