[Python-Dev] PEPS, version control, release intervals

[Andrew Kuchling]

On Mon, Feb 05, 2001 at 03:22:21PM -0600, Skip Montanaro wrote:
>heartburn.  To release 2.1 on 4/1/01 as PEP 226 suggests it will be with
>more language changes that could cause problems for existing code (weak refs
>and nested scopes get mentioned all the time) seems a bit fast, especially
>since the status of two relevant PEPs are "incomplete" and "draft",
>respectively.

Note that making new releases come out more quickly was one of GvR's
goals.  With frequent releases, much of the motivation for a
Linux-style development/production split goes away; new Linux kernels
take about 2 years to appear, and in that time people still need to
get driver fixes, security updates, and so forth.  There seem far
fewer things worth fixing in a Python 2.0.1; the wiki contains one
critical patch and 5 misc. ones.

A more critical issue might be why people haven't adopted 2.0 yet;
there seems little reason is there to continue using 1.5.2, yet I
still see questions on the XML-SIG, for example, from people who
haven't upgraded.  Is it that Zope doesn't support it?  Or that Red
Hat and Debian don't include it?  This needs fixing, or else we'll
wind up with a community scattered among lots of different versions.

(I hope someone is going to include all these issues in the agenda for
"Collaborative Devel. Issues" on Developers' Day!  They're certainly
worth discussing...)

--amk