As per the python-ideas thread starting at https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2017-October/047508.html, this is proposal to add a `pip -r` compatible `recommended-packages.txt` file to the `venv` documentation that summarises replacement module recommendations in other parts of the standard library documentation.

Suggested entries are:

requests    # Recommendation in urllib.request docs
regex       # Recommendation in re docs
cffi        # More typesafe alternative to ctypes
six         # Python 2/3 compatibility library
setuptools  # Alternative to distutils that supports modern packaging standards

I'm also tempted to suggest pytz as the preferred source of up-to-date named timezones, but I'm not sure how often that's really needed in situations where you can't just depend on it explicitly instead.