sgmllib too slow

[Martin v. Löwis]

Robin Becker <robin at jessikat.fsnet.co.uk> writes:

> I assume the problem stems from lib (or lib/pythonxx.x) being in
> sys.path before lib/site-packages. That order seems a bit barmy given
> that site-packages is supposed to specialize the installation. Of course
> given the huge care taken over every aspect of Python's development I
> suppose there was no small care taken in getting it that way.

Indeed, the rationale for making it hard to override the standard
library is that people will report difficult-to-reproduce bug reports,
that may turn out to rely on buggy replacements. If I see "sgmllib" in
a bug report, today I only need to ask for the Python version to know
what code is in use (most likely - unless ActiveState chose to edit
the code). 

If site-packages had priority, I'd need to request for every bug
report that a detailed listing of all installed packages is given.
That would make it unmaintainable.

Regards,
Martin