[Python-Dev] Python Library Support in 3.x (Was: email package status in 3.X)

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

anatoly techtonik writes:

 > I do not know what are you intending to do, but my opinion that
 > fund raising for patching library is a waste of money.

Of course it's not a waste of money.  The need is real, so as long as
the PSF and other organizations (GSoC) choose reasonable projects/
people to support, progress will be steady.  Merely the sense that
real resources are flowing into the stdlib from outside the volunteer
core will encourage more volunteers as well.

 > PSF should concentrate on enhancing tools to make lives of library
 > supporters easier. I do not want to become a maintainer,

Well, the current maintainers, while not yet happy with the state of
the infrastructure, have been steadily engaged in improving it by
adding features that have consensus support.  But getting consensus
support is not easy.

Eg, I thought that with three plausible candidates, of which Mercurial
was obviously satisfactory (although I preferred git, myself, and a at
least couple people advocated Bazaar strongly), a switch to a dVCS was
a no-brainer.  It wasn't.  Several people opposed it strongly until it
became clear that in theory at least it would require *no* changes to
current workflow (although I think most of those developers will find
much to like about the changes Mercurial will bring).  And even now
implementation is hanging up on the requirement that it not affect
Windows-based developers adversely ... and it turns out that even
being Python-based is nowhere near enough to guarantee that, but
rather it requires further effort before that will become reality --
and it's not forthcoming from the Mercurial developers, who
unsurprisingly like Mercurial enough to deal with the minor flaws.

IMO, if you want to improve the infrastructure, you need to work on
getting consensus behind a few of your proposals, rather than making
one after another and not following up with code or a PEP.