ElementTree - Why not part of the core?

[Giovanni Bajo]

rurpy at yahoo.com wrote:

>> I think some people were hoping that instead of adding these things
>> to
>> the standard library, we would come up with a better package manager
>> that would make adding these things to your local library much
>> simpler.
>>
>> STeVe
>>
>>
[1]http://www.python.org/dev/summary/2005-06-01_2005-06-15.html#reorganising-th
e-standard-library-again
>
> A better package manager would be great but does not
> replace having things in the core.  Distributed code that
> relies on external packages puts a significantly greater
> burden on the user of the code.

Seconded.

One thing I really fear about the otherwise great EasyInstall (and Python Eggs)
is that we could forget about


Let's not turn the Python standard library into the CPAN mess, where there are
5 different libraries for adding two numbers, so that it's then impossible to
grab a random perl program and read it, without going through 150 different man
pages you never saw before. I don't need 450 libraries to compute MD5, or to
zip a file, or 140 different implementations of random numbers. There will
always be external libraries for specific purposes, but I'd rather the standard
library to stay focused on provided a possibly restricted set of common
features with a decent interface/implementation.

This said, I'd also like to see ElementTree in the standard library. We already
have a SAX and a DOM, but we need a Pythonic XML library, and ElementTree is
just perfect.
-- 
Giovanni Bajo