Ned Deily added the comment: Joseph, thanks for taking an interest in improving Python and submitting this patch. Alas, I don't think we should apply it. There are always tradeoffs that have to be considered when changing existing code. Distutils is one of the oldest and most external facing of Python's standard library modules. Distutils is a key dependency of many other critical third-party projects, like setuptools and pip. Also, Numpy subclasses and extends parts of Distutils. Many third-party projects are set up to work with multiple versions of Python so we always need to be careful about introducing changes in one version that might break that version independence. On the one hand, this change is small and seems to be likely to be safe, although it is very difficult to know for sure how third-parties may currently be using strtobool() in their own code. On the other hand, what does making this change buy us and users? The only thing I can see is a more modern return type and slightly cleaner code. In cases like that, we usually say that the status quo wins: we choose to not make changes that have no real benefit (other than a minor aesthetic one) but could possibly introduce an incompatibility. Yes, if we were writing Distutils today, it would definitely return a boolean but that's not a good enough reason to change it now. Other opinions?
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