[issue26488] hashlib command line interface

[Raymond Hettinger]

Raymond Hettinger added the comment:

Guido, would you can to opine on this?  Every now and then we get a request to make command-line utilities out of tools in the standard library.  Whether we should or not depends on whether the standard library intends to be primarily a library for Python code or whether it is also about providing general purpose toolkits that might be helpful in a non-unix environment.

We've has some of these that have met with success (for example, timeit, json.tool, and SimpleHTTPServer) and others that were just a waste or a were a pale shadow of their full featured Unix counterparts (or left to rot in the Tools directory).  

If we go further down this road, it would be nice for you to lay out the ground roads for what kind of command line tools would be acceptable, how stable their API would be, and whether they should be separated from the module itself.  Do you even want to be in the business of offering command-line APIs that duplicate commonly available Unix tools?

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assignee:  -> gvanrossum
nosy: +gvanrossum

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue26488>
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