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A little late because it was the kids' birthday yesterday, this month's Stack Report, some thoughts on Django Core.
https://buttondown.com/carlton/archive/thoughts-on-djangos-core/ #Django #TheStackReport
@carlton Oh this is a difficult report to read for me, since the topic existed 15 years ago and it’s sad for me that we haven’t figured it out yet. (1/3)
I’ve gotten a few Django apps into and out of core, but it took a lot of effort and probably more privilege than reasonable. Maybe with more people working on Django as their day job, without strings attached, maybe we’d have more time to work on stewarding a framework like Django? I’m worried we’ll always err on the side of caution and scarcity otherwise, given the scale of use. (2/3)
I don’t believe that “stdlib is where packages go to die” is the right metaphor BTW, it’s a pretty bleak worldview IMO. Working on built-in features just necessarily has a higher bar for stability and restraint (!=features) than 3rd party packages that can be easily installed with our favorite package managers, whenever needed. (3/3)
@jezdez 
Wish I could like this multiple times.
I never liked this metaphor, I think software graduating to this level of maturity should be celebrated! The challenges are there might not be any "easy" tasks to cut your teeth on or "shiny" development work to attract new contributors. In that way I can see software "dying" due to lack of maintainers.
We need to change our view of meaningful maintenance / stewardship of mature code to be more positive.
@sethmlarson @jezdez re: "stdlib is where packages go to die" I have never been a fan of it either.
If we had a week of funding for every time I have heard a CPython core mention it, we'd each have a few years of runway.
I think it's mostly projecting how they view it vs. how it should be.
@webology @sethmlarson @jezdez Uhm, no. It's projecting how Hyrum's Law and Python's backward compatibility guarantees interact. We've seen it numerous times in bug reports: any substantial change to _any_ aspect of _any_ stdlib module ends up unacceptably affecting users. The risk of substantial changes becomes too high, and there is no way to sensibly evolve anything, because there's no way to have experimental features. They are evolutionary dead.
@Yhg1s @sethmlarson @jezdez You missed the point 
@webology @sethmlarson @jezdez Maybe I have. My point is that Core Devs saying "the stdlib is where packages go to die" has nothing to do with funding or support or the will to change things, nor about "just a higher bar".
@Yhg1s @webology @sethmlarson @jezdez Yea, I agree with this take. Once software has a large number of users, it basically makes it impossible to change. Bringing something into core dramatically expands the number of users, which then makes it impossible to change.
@sethmlarson @jezdez My impression is that stability is one point, but the bigger part is that it becomes one of many modules requiring the (small) core team‘s attention. It usually will lack a champion with the to be expected consequences.