PEP: 360 Title: Externally Maintained Packages Version: $Revision$
Last-Modified: $Date$ Author: Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> Status:
Final Type: Process Content-Type: text/x-rst Created: 30-May-2006
Post-History:

Warning

No new modules are to be added to this PEP. It has been deemed dangerous
to codify external maintenance of any code checked into Python's code
repository. Code contributors should expect Python's development
methodology to be used for any and all code checked into Python's code
repository.

Abstract

There are many great pieces of Python software developed outside of the
Python standard library (a.k.a., the "stdlib"). Sometimes it makes sense
to incorporate these externally maintained packages into the stdlib in
order to fill a gap in the tools provided by Python.

But by having the packages maintained externally it means Python's
developers do not have direct control over the packages' evolution and
maintenance. Some package developers prefer to have bug reports and
patches go through them first instead of being directly applied to
Python's repository.

This PEP is meant to record details of packages in the stdlib that are
maintained outside of Python's repository. Specifically, it is meant to
keep track of any specific maintenance needs for each package. It should
be mentioned that changes needed in order to fix bugs and keep the code
running on all of Python's supported platforms will be done directly in
Python's repository without worrying about going through the contact
developer. This is so that Python itself is not held up by a single bug
and allows the whole process to scale as needed.

It also is meant to allow people to know which version of a package is
released with which version of Python.

Externally Maintained Packages

The section title is the name of the package as it is known outside of
the Python standard library. The "standard library name" is what the
package is named within Python. The "contact person" is the Python
developer in charge of maintaining the package. The "synchronisation
history" lists what external version of the package was included in each
version of Python (if different from the previous Python release).

ElementTree

Web site

    http://effbot.org/zone/element-index.htm

Standard library name

    xml.etree

Contact person

    Fredrik Lundh

Fredrik has ceded ElementTree maintenance to the core Python development
team[1].

Expat XML parser

Web site

    http://www.libexpat.org/

Standard library name

    N/A (this refers to the parser itself, and not the Python bindings)

Contact person

    None

Optik

Web site

    http://optik.sourceforge.net/

Standard library name

    optparse

Contact person

    Greg Ward

External development seems to have ceased. For new applications,
optparse itself has been largely superseded by argparse.

wsgiref

Web site

    None

Standard library name

    wsgiref

Contact Person

    Phillip J. Eby

This module is maintained in the standard library, but significant bug
reports and patches should pass through the Web-SIG mailing list [2] for
discussion.

References

Copyright

This document has been placed in the public domain.



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[1] Fredrik's handing over of ElementTree
(https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2012-February/116389.html)

[2] Web-SIG mailing list
(https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/web-sig)