ElementTree - Why not part of the core?

[Magnus Lycka]

doug.bromley at gmail.com wrote:
> ElementTree on the other hand provides incredibly easy access to XML
> elements and works in a more Pythonic way.  Why has the API not been
> included in the Python core?

I'd really like to see that too. Sure, it's fairly trivial to install
it, but each different package that needs to be installed from another
source, built and tested on multiple platforms etc, means more work.
For complex software systems, these kinds of configuration issues
take a lot of efforts.

We're deploying our software on a number of different platforms. We
certainly depend on Python, so a standard Python install will always
be included. Using standard library modules is for free. Using yet
another third party library has a cost, even if some Cheese Shop or
whatever might make the cost slightly lower.

We have very friendly configuration management guys here, so if I
insisted, I'm sure they'd let me have elementTree included, but I
hesitate to ask for it. It does add a burden on CM, increases the
risk that a deployment will fail, and from a code maintenance point
of view, it's a double edged sword: On one hand, it's a much better
API, but on the other hand, it's not documented in the standard
Python docs or in the Nutshell book, and a new developer would need
to figure out what this foreign beast was, and where to find docs.
(Alternatively, I'd have to (God forbid) document my actions. ;)