[Python-Dev] 2.7/3.2 release schedule

[Guido van Rossum]

On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 8:09 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> Guido van Rossum <guido <at> python.org> writes:
>>
>> Was this discussed somewhere?
>
> I don't remember so, except for a short subthread on python-ideas where you
> indeed mentioned (to my disappointment :-)) that you were against a one-year
> release period.

Trust me on this too, please. We used to have releases once a year and
we got really big serious feedback from our biggest users that the
release cycle was going too fast. We discussed it amply and agreed on
a minimum time of 18 months between releases. This was quite a while
ago (I recall it being somewhere between 2000 and 2004) but I don't
see that the situation has really changed -- if anything, we need to
slow down more. We should really have a PEP for this, like we do for
bugfix releases (PEP 6), but at the time we weren't so anal about PEPs
for process.

I realize this can be frustrating for developers who want to see their
code released. I had the same feeling at the time. But when it was
explained to me what a version upgrade looks like for a typical large
company who have 100,000 or more lines of Python, often with
insufficient tests, written by people who no longer work for the
company or expensive consultants, I realized that releasing once a
year was a break-neck pace for such users. There was wide discussion
and community agreement on the 18 months minimum, as a compromise
between the needs of large users (who would have been happier with two
years) and the desires of developers (who, like you, preferred shorter
release cycles).

I really don't think we should change this "contract with our users"
now. If necessary, we'll have to write a PEP to describe and explain
it.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)