[Doc-SIG] soundex module status?

[Skip Montanaro]

>>>>> "Guido" == Guido van Rossum <guido@CNRI.Reston.VA.US> writes:

    Guido> Sigh.  I wish that module went away -- it offends my sense of
    Guido> what should be a standard library facility (like several other
    Guido> very old modules, including some I wrote, mind you -- it's just
    Guido> that this one's in C, which makes it more of a liability).  If
    Guido> anything, it should be rewritten in Python, I really don't see
    Guido> why it has to be in C.  It also makes sense to dig out the
    Guido> official algorithm from somewhere.

I'd be happy to shepherd it contrib and into Python as well.  I'm sure it
can safely be recoded in Python.  I doubt my needs for it would suffer if
that happened.

It sounds to me like Python really needs a way to allow people to easily
incorporate "contrib" stuff into their installations.  This is way off-topic
for this list, so I'll only toss out one dumb comment about how easily I'd
like things to be, then shut up.

I like the side-effect documentation of using configure to install Python
and associated bits.  I can glance at the top of config.status and see how I
configured Python six months ago (or egcs or binutils or anything else).
I'd love to see something like

    ./configure --with-thread --with-contrib="soundex msql fred"

in config.status that tells me not only how I configured Python, but what
non-core modules I downloaded and installed.  CPAN works similarly, though
doesn't necessarily provide the concise documentation of the installation.
The side-effect of --with-contrib would be to download the named modules
from PPAN (or wherever) and install them along with the rest of Python.

If downloading, configuring and installing non-core modules was this easy, I
wouldn't care much if you decided to cut the cgi module out of the core
distribution.

(That said, I know Greg Ward has been working on installation issues.)

Once something fairly transparent is available, I think Guido should
partition the core distribution into disjoint "offensive" and "defensive"
sets, with the "offensive" stuff winding up in contrib and the "defensive"
stuff remaining in the core.

Skip