* separated values

[Skip Montanaro]

    >> Of course I want! But even more I want to make the distribution
    >> slimmer, and allow people to download and install huge number of
    >> additional modules.

    Cliff> It might make more sense to break the library up into related
    Cliff> chunks:  
    ...
    Cliff> Then have all of these available at the same location to make
    Cliff> finding and downloading easier....

Cliff,

You obviously need to hang out on help at python.org for awhile. ;-) Many
questions come from people who can't even find the current Windows
installer, or if they do, can't figure out what to do with it.  They are
going to me miserable if they have to download and install multiple
mini-distributions.

The only way this would come close to working is if you had proper
dependency checks in the mini-distributions (ciphon?): everything depends on
the base, image processing probably depends on GUI (PIL likes Tkinter),
communications depends on text processing (XML is used for XML-RPC), etc.  I
suspect that when all is said and done, the amount of "stuff" the user has
to download and install to get up and running will be nearly as large as
what they download now, and in the process the effort required to install
what they need will have gone up substantially.

-- 
Skip Montanaro (skip at pobox.com - http://www.mojam.com/)