[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I hadn't thought there was any controversy over the technical side of
this.

There isn't. The interface might be beautifully designed, and you might claim it is, and I would *still* require that the module gets field testing before being incorporated into Python. If other people start attesting that the module is beatifully designed, and should be included in the Python core - *then* it is worth looking into inclusion.

I'm happy to have that kind of testing (and I requested it), given
that the goal is inclusion in the core, and the core developers have
told me (as they did) that the proposal looks good and they'd like to
have the module, so I can reasonably expect it to go into the core if
it meets its technical expectations.

Not if I have a say in it. *Any* new module should see out-of-the-core distribution first (unless there is BDFL pronouncement to include it, of course).

This really is a matter of development process, not of technical
quality.

If the developers instead say (as they seemed to somewhat later) that
because of legal/political concerns, there's no way the module can
possibly go into the core no matter how good it is technically, then
my motivation for writing the module dries up quite a bit.

I personally would not say that, although I can imagine that some people do say that, and I would also defend an inclusion, and push compliance the BXA requirements so we can legally export Python out of the U.S.A.

Evidently not always.  And how would the CGI user create a binary
anyway, even given a way to install it, if the web hosting service is
using a platform that the CGI user doesn't have a compiler for?  Think
of a Mac user whose web host runs Windows, or vice versa.

In either case, the user would best use the pre-compiled binary that somebody else provided for the platform. Actually, the Windows user using an OS X CGI server can probably just invoke the gcc which is on the target system, anyway.

See, this is the critical point: "commonly-used functions", not
"functions I believe would be commonly used". You must have
*existing* users for a function to be commonly-used.


You're going around in circles.

No, I'm merely repeating myself, and rephrasing each time. I have to, because apparently you don't see what my requirement is.

They have few Python users because the functions aren't available in
Python.  To fix that, they must be added to Python.  How many users
do you think the Python sha module had before it went into Python?

The original source code of the SHA-1 implementation is the NIST code (Gutmann, then Hollerbach), so I guess that had hundreds of users before the module was contributed to Python. The module itself (including the API) was written by Greg Stein and Andrew Kuchling. I believe (without being able to verify) that they distributed this module for quite some time, before contributing it to Python. We would have to ask them how many users they had until they felt confident to contribute the code.

Regards,
Martin

Andrew Kuchling
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