Why do Pythoneers reinvent the wheel?

[Paul Boddie]

A.M. Kuchling wrote:
> PEP 206 (http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0206.html) suggests assembling an
> advanced library for particular problem domains (e.g. web programming,
> scientific programming), and then providing a script that pulls the relevant
> packages off PyPI.  I'd like to hear suggestions of application domains and
> of the packages that should be included.

I'm not against pointing people in what I consider to be the right
direction, but PEP 206 seems to be quite the lobbying instrument for
people to fast-track pet projects into the standard library (or some
super-distribution), perhaps repeating some of the mistakes cited in
that document with regard to suitability. Meanwhile, in several areas,
some of the pressing needs of the standard library would remain
unaddressed if left to some kind of Pythonic popularity contest; for
example, everyone likes to dish out their favourite soundbites and
insults about DOM-based XML APIs, but just leaving minidom in the
library in slow motion maintenance mode whilst advocating more
"Pythonic" APIs doesn't help Python's interoperability with (or
relevance to) the wider development community.

The standard library is all about providing acceptable solutions so
that other people aren't inclined or forced to write their own. Every
developer should look at their repertoire of packages and consider
which ones wouldn't need to exist if the standard library had been
better. For me, if there had been a decent collection of Web
application objects in the standard library, I wouldn't have created
WebStack; if I didn't have to insist on PyXML and then provide patches
for it in order to let others run software I created, I wouldn't have
created libxml2dom.

PEP 206 is an interesting idea but "dangerous" because as a PEP it
promotes a seemingly purely informational guide to some kind of edict,
and (speaking from experience) since a comprehensive topic guide to any
reasonable number of packages and solutions is probably too much work
that no-one really wants to do anyway, the likelihood of subjective
popularity criteria influencing the selection of presented software
means that the result may be considerably flawed. Although I see that a
common trend these days is to form some kind of narrow consensus, hype
it repeatedly and, in the name of one cause, to push another agenda
entirely, all whilst ignoring the original problems that got people
thinking in the first place, I am quite sure that as a respected Python
contributor this was not a goal of yours in writing the PEP. However,
we should all be aware of the risks of picking favourites, even if the
level of dispute around those favourites is likely to be much lower for
some packages than for others.

This overly harsh criticism really brings me to ask: what happened to
the maintenance and promotion of the python.org topic guides? Or do
people only read PEPs these days?

Paul