ElementTree - Why not part of the core?

[Magnus Lycka]

Fredrik Lundh wrote:
> but seriously, given how easy it is to build things with distutils, I don't think your
> configuration folks would have much trouble adding support for "anything that has
> a setup file, and is reasonably self-contained" to their build scripts.

True. It's one more thing to keep track of though. It's a separate
configuration item. We need to keep track of which version to use,
and it needs to get built, installed and validated on all supported
platforms.

I already include Twisted (and thus ZopeInterface) like that. We
sometimes need high speed in XML parsing, so I'd like to use
cElementTree, but just like the two other packages, I assume that
it's unproblematic to build the included C code. So, you're right,
it's not much trouble, just two more pebbles (cElementTree and
ElementTree) on a fairly heavy load, where stuff like Oracle and MQ
Series are more like boulders.

Right now, I would like to improve the performace of a program that
does a lot of XML parsing. I haven't profiled that yet, so I don't
know if XML parsing is the bottle neck, but if I can improve perfor-
mance significantly with cElementTree, I'll certainly push for that.


/Magnus