In http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2012-March/117570.html Steven D'Aprano posted:
> "Need" is awfully strong. I don't believe it is the responsibility > of the standard library to be judge and reviewer of third party > packages that it doesn't control. It is, however, user-friendly to indicate when the stdlib selections are particularly likely to be for reasons other than "A bunch of experts believe this is the best way to do this." Cpython's documentation is (de facto) the documentation for python in general, and pointing people towards other resources (particularly pypi itself) is quite reasonable. Many modules are in the stdlib in part because they are an *acceptable* way of doing something, and the "best" ways are either changing too quickly or are so complicated that it doesn't make sense to burden the *standard* libary for specialist needs. In those cases, I do think the documentation should say so. Specific examples: http://docs.python.org/library/numeric.html quite reasonably has subsections only for what ships with Python. But I think the introductory paragraph could stand to have an extra sentence explaining why and when people should look beyond the stanard library, such as: Applications centered around mathematics may benefit from specialist 3rd party libraries, such as numpy < http://pypi.python.org/pypi/numpy/ >, gmpy < http://pypi.python.org/pypi/gmpy >, and scipy< http://pypi.python.org/pypi/scipy >. I would add a similar sentence to the web section, or the internet protocols section if web is still not broken out separately. http://docs.python.org/dev/library/internet.html Note that some web conventions are still evolving too quickly for covenient encapsulation in a stable library. Many applications will therefore prefer functional replacements from third parties, such as requests or httplib2, or frameworks such as Django and Zope. www-related products can be found by browsing PyPI for top internet subtopic www/http. < http://pypi.python.org/pypi?:action=browse&c=319&c=326 > [I think that searching by classifier -- which first requires browse, and can't be reached from the list of classifiers -- could be improved.] > Should we recommend wxPython over Pyjamas or PyGUI or PyGtk? Actually, I think the existing http://docs.python.org/library/othergui.html does a pretty good job; I would not object to adding mentions of other tools as well, but wiki reference is probably sufficient. -jJ -- If there are still threading problems with my replies, please email me with details, so that I can try to resolve them. -jJ _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com