René's URL Explorer Experiment

{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"DiscussionForumPosting","headline":"Move or remove useless/irrelevant command line interface (CLI) on stdlib modules","articleBody":"In issue gh-109435, I documented stdlib modules provinding an useful or interesting CLI: https://docs.python.org/dev/library/cmdline.html\r\n\r\nSome stdlib modules include self-tests in their main() function. I dislike that and I would suggest to remove it and at least move it to their test suite.\r\n\r\n* ctypes.util: self-test\r\n* curses.has_key: self-test?\r\n* getopt: self-test\r\n* heapq: self-test\r\n* imaplib: self-test, \"test the IMAP4_stream class\"\r\n* modulefinder: self-test\r\n* symtable: self-test. parse itself (symtable.py)\r\n* textwrap: self-test\r\n* tkinter: self-test\r\n* wsgiref.simple_server: self-test, run a server, open itself in a browser, stop the server.\r\n* xml.sax.xmlreader: self-test.\r\n\r\nMaybe demos should be moved as examples in the documentation instead?\r\n\r\n* ctypes.textpad: demo\r\n* shlex: print tokens. Is it really useful?\r\n* ``dbm.__init__``: get the DB type... but this CLI is not easy discoverable, it's in the __init__ module!\r\n* netrc: just parse ``~/.netrc`` if available, and then display nothing... not very useful\r\n* smtplib: \"Test the sendmail method\", try to send an email to localhost SMTP server.\r\n* xmlrpc.client + xmlrpc.server: simple demo.\r\n\r\nThe random module includes a benchmark. I don't think that it's useful to regular users, it should be moved somewhere else:\r\n\r\n* random: benchmark\r\n\r\nI'm fine with keeping easter eggs:\r\n\r\n* turtle: it's a demo. Looks more like an easter egg or advanced example than \"an useful CLI\".\r\n* xml.sax.expatreader: Sheakspear easter egg.\r\n\r\nSee also issue gh-93096 \"Decide the fate of undocumented script behavior of some modules\".","author":{"url":"https://github.com/vstinner","@type":"Person","name":"vstinner"},"datePublished":"2023-09-29T07:00:12.000Z","interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":"https://schema.org/CommentAction","userInteractionCount":7},"url":"https://github.com/110076/cpython/issues/110076"}