Development Philosophy

Requests is an open but opinionated library, created by an open but opinionated developer.

Benevolent Dictator

Kenneth Reitz is the BDFL. He has final say in any decision related to Requests.

Values

  • Simplicity is always better than functionality.

  • Listen to everyone, then disregard it.

  • The API is all that matters. Everything else is secondary.

  • Fit the 90% use-case. Ignore the nay-sayers.

Semantic Versioning

For many years, the open source community has been plagued with version number dystonia. Numbers vary so greatly from project to project, they are practically meaningless.

Requests uses Semantic Versioning. This specification seeks to put an end to this madness with a small set of practical guidelines for you and your colleagues to use in your next project.

Standard Library?

Requests has no active plans to be included in the standard library. This decision has been discussed at length with Guido as well as numerous core developers.

Essentially, the standard library is where a library goes to die. It is appropriate for a module to be included when active development is no longer necessary.

Requests just reached v1.0.0. This huge milestone marks a major step in the right direction.

Linux Distro Packages

Distributions have been made for many Linux repositories, including: Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, and Arch.

These distributions are sometimes divergent forks, or are otherwise not kept up-to-date with the latest code and bugfixes. PyPI (and its mirrors) and GitHub are the official distribution sources; alternatives are not supported by the requests project.