Meta: how we evaluate / reach consensus on / approve ideas as a community

[hugovk (Hugo van Kemenade)]

@kknechtel

While I don’t mean to advocate for removing anything else specific, I generally wonder if it wouldn’t be better to commit to a general continued slimming down of the standard library.

The PEP 594 acceptance recommended regular reviews:

@gpshead

Doing a “mass cleanup” of long obsolete modules is a sign that we as a project have been ignoring rather than maintaining parts of the standard library, or not doing so with the diligence being in the standard library implies they deserve. […] It seems worthwhile for us to conduct regular reviews of the contents of the stdlib every few releases so we can avoid accumulating such a large pile of dead batteries, but this is outside the scope of this particular PEP.

There was another non-PEP 594 module removed in 3.13 (lib2to3). I don’t see any other modules pending removal, but many other things are deprecated and set for future removal.