[Python-Dev] release plan for 2.5 ?

[Neil Schemenauer]

Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> PEP 349 - str() may return unicode. Where is this?

Does that mean you didn't find and read the PEP or was it written so
badly that it answered none of your questions?  The PEP is on
python.org with all the rest.  I set the status to "Deferred"
because it seemed that no one was interested in the change.

> I'm not at all sure the PEP is ready. it would probably be a lot
> of work to make this work everywhere in the C code, not to mention
> the stdlib .py code. Perhaps this should be targeted for 2.6
> instead? The consequences seem potentially huge.

The backwards compatibility problems *seem* to be relatively minor.
I only found one instance of breakage in the standard library.  Note
that my patch does not change PyObject_Str(); that would break
massive amounts of code.  Instead, I introduce a new function:
PyString_New().  I'm not crazy about the name but I couldn't think
of anything better.

  Neil