[Python-ideas] Geo coordinates conversion in stdlib

[anatoly techtonik]

On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 5:04 PM, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Mar 28, 2015 at 12:52 AM, anatoly techtonik <techtonik at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Why the wave module is there? Or ioctl module? Are they so widely used?
> >
> > This process is flawed. If anybody would sponsor the research on
> popularity
> > of stdlib, I believe that math will be excluded from top 50 as well. Will
> > stdlib
> > without math will still be ok?
> >
> > The measure to estimate the usefullness of standard library is not in
> > download score, but in coverage across different areas. There thousands
> of
> > people downloading stuff from youtube, so should we include youtube-dl
> > instead of math?
>
> The criteria for the *removal* from the stdlib would be insanely
> tight, compared to the criteria for *addition*. So some modules might
> now simply be grandfathered in (I suspect wave is one of them), due to
> the shift in ease of grabbing stuff off PyPI. But the math module is
> pretty important and fundamental, so it's not going anywhere.
>
> As to youtube-dl, though: Definitely not. No matter how popular it is,
> it still fails the criterion of release schedule synchronization - it
> needs to be agile enough to update as often as it needs, according to
> host site changes, and would be shackled rather badly by inclusion in
> the stdlib. (You probably don't want to get it from your OS repo
> either.)
>
> But none of this changes the recommendations I made earlier. You need
> to *demonstrate*, not simply state, a need; and one of the best ways
> to demonstrate support, API stability, usage, etc, is to stick a
> package up on PyPI. Not everything needs to be in the stdlib, but if
> you're going to argue that something should be, what better way than
> by pointing out what it's already doing?


There is now quite a big lump of data for me that in social systems (such
as community developed projects) the reputation is more important than
rationale, so how do you imagine a demonstration? Well, I have this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_eclipses_in_the_21st_century
here is the list of all sun eclipses in the World. How would you show
them on map to paste into your student paper? You need to import the
table into your spreadsheet, then transform coordinates into floats and
then export the data for you map drawing tools. The problem -
spreadsheets don't convert coordinates. You need a script for that.
And that script you will need for much every data processing involving
data from Wikipedia.

Is that fair enough for demonstration of a need?

-- 
anatoly t.
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