Best Python packages?

[Ben Sizer]

On Jul 16, 3:31 pm, Fredrik Lundh <fred... at pythonware.com> wrote:
> Ben Sizer wrote:
> > make my development a lot easier.
>
> Knowing what kind of development you do might help, of course.  Some
> libraries are excellent in some contexts and suck badly in others...

Sure. Mostly I'm just interested in what's out there though. In C++
you have Boost which everybody knows are a source of high quality
libraries, covering a fairly wide set of applications. Obviously
that's more low-level and less application specific, and the Python
standard libs do pretty much everything that is in Boost, but it's
that sort of peer-reviewed and widely-applicable list that I'd like to
see.

I (attempt to) use TurboGears for web development and that depends on
a whole bunch of libraries - SQLObject, PyProtocols, RuleDispatch,
SimpleJson, FormEncode, etc - and I would never have heard of these if
TurboGears' exposure of its internals wasn't so common. Some of these
are web-specific but some are not. And I'd never know to look for them
specificially, because in many cases it wouldn't occur to me that they
exist. (eg. Object-Relational Mappers like SQLObject may be obvious if
you come from certain areas of IT, but I'd never heard of them before
I started with TurboGears.)

For what it's worth, my main areas of interest are gaming, multimedia,
and web development. But I just like to hear about anything that
people might use which makes their life a lot easier and which perhaps
is not application specific - like ORMs or something similar.

> Looking at things that larger projects and distributions use can also be
> a good idea.  For example, if you're doing scientific stuff, go directly
> to enthought.com.  If you're doing web stuff, look at the libraries big
> Django applications use.  Etc.

Sadly, I know just as little about what major applications are out
there as I do about what libraries are out there!

--
Ben Sizer