On Apr 5, 2020, at 02:48, Pete Wicken <petewic...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Personally I have found that stdlib support for networking is strangely > patchy at the moment; with ipaddress being a great handy module for IP work > without requiring dependencies; but seemingly very little networking support > before or after that. The 'before' part is what my idea is attempting to > tackle. I am not recommending we start investigating further layers of the > networking stack post-IP, however I feel the logical step forwards is to have > some form of support for the most common form of layer 2 addressing.
I think Python is just following history here. It has nice wrappers for everything C/POSIX/Sockets exposed, and then it has higher-level libraries for all the protocols that were really important in the early 90s, and that’s it. And then it has selectors and asyncio, and above or below that level to replace all the old stuff. But if the stdlib were designed from scratch today rather than over the past 30 years, I think it would have less than it does, not more. Up to around a decade ago, installing third-party libraries was a huge mess, but nowadays, PyPI works, Python comes with pip pre-installed, and telling developers they need internet access when they first start a new project isn’t considered onerous. And meanwhile, a lot of things people need in the real world evolve a lot faster than Python can keep up with. So the Python documentation now points people to third-party libs like requests and numpy, and the trend is more in that direction rather than the stdlib trying to do everything. (Even pip uses requests rather than anyone trying to update urllib and cert management and so on to make it unnecessary.) However, I think that a macaddress library could easily be one of the few things that does properly fit in the networking section of the stdlib. It’s a small feature, and it should be very stable—I think the last change to the protocol spec was about 20 years ago, and from a brief scan of the release notes for netaddr it looks like for the last decade its needed less than one bugfix or feature per year for dealing with MAC/EUI addresses… _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/LFORKING5GPXSOU7FY5MRRZU6YR2G65K/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
