This may somewhat explain why lots of successful packages are not in the stdlib: putting them in effectively killed future development until a few years ago. But today that argument is inconsistently applied and I'm not sure if it's a rule worth keeping.

Pypi have thrown out the downloads counter—a huge misservice to coders. Like I got all day to figure out the best libs for ten different features which I only need in passing, so my primary concern is to not pick complete garbage.

So, my solution to that now is to look up Github pages for the libs and choose the one with most stars. As much as I dislike Github for its occasional typical proprietary behavior, Gitlab doesn't help in this case.

A better approach might be to add a core of basic requests-like features built from the stdlib’s existing resources. That would be beneficial to many users and if they need more then there’s always Requests.

To the best of my knowledge, minor version updates in Python 3 have been entirely backwards so far and shouldn't have broken any library code. And as for incompatible changes sick as the transition to 3, then these of course had interface changes in the standard library.

I'm not entirely sure what you're looking for, but have you tried https://www.enthought.com/product/enthought-deployment-manag... ?

Edit: example

    $ edm envs create tester36 --version 3.6
    $ edm shell -e tester36
    (tester36) $ edm install ipython matplotlib pyqt

> As an aside, why doesn’t the Python standard library extend/replace features with code from successful packages like Requests?

It is possible (ie. asyncio was separate package). It is slow process though.

https://python.libhunt.com/ Not exactly curation but it does have rated libs for lots of categories.

That would be my guess. I would also add that getting through the process of adding a third-party set of modules to the standard library can take quite a while.