As a general direction, I’d rather see “optional extension modules”[1] living outside the main repo and brought in later in the build/release process. Presumably such modules have no tight core dependency, or they wouldn’t be able to be optional, and so they should be able to build on pre-release runtimes and work fine with released runtimes (as we expect of 3rd party developers).
The bootstrapping position is discussed in the proposed text and determined to be viable. I think this position applies equally well to bootstrapping the modules we theoretically expect people to write that rely on non-core dependencies.
Merging in additional modules as part of our release process is fine. Bundling additional sources and optional build steps into the source tarball is fine (if we think that Linux distros will just ignore us when we say “you should include these modules in your Python runtime”).
For what it’s worth, I believe that the parts of CPython that directly depend on OpenSSL and Tcl/Tk are also fit for this. So don’t see my position as being about Rust itself[2] - it’s about the direction we should be taking with adding new modules to the core runtime.
In short, adding new ways to add new, non-essential modules to the core is counter to the approach we’ve been taking over the last few years. So I’m -1 on adding one.
