[Python-Dev] What's New text on future maintenance

[Guido van Rossum]

On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 6:50 PM, A.M. Kuchling <amk at amk.ca> wrote:
> FYI: I've just added the text below to the "What's New" document for
> 2.7.  I wanted to describe how 2.7 will probably be maintained, but
> didn't want to write anything that sounded like an iron-clad guarantee
> of a maintenance timespan.  Does this text seem like a reasonable set
> of statements?
>
> --amk
>
> Python 2.7 is intended to be the last major release in the 2.x series.
> Though more major releases have not been absolutely ruled out, the

I would scrap the "Though more ... ruled out" part. That just stokes
unrealistic hopes. :-)

> Python maintainers are planning to focus their efforts on Python 3.x.
>
> This means that 2.7 will remain in place for a long time, running
> production systems that have not been ported to Python 3.x.
> Two consequences of the long-term significance of 2.7 are:
>
> * It's very likely the 2.7 release will have a longer period of
>  maintenance compared to earlier 2.x versions.  Python 2.7 will
>  continue to be maintained while the transition to 3.x is in
>  progress, and that transition will itself be lengthy.  Most 2.x
>  versions are maintained for about 4 years, from the first to the
>  last bugfix release; patchlevel releases for Python 2.7 will
>  probably be made for at least 6 years.
>
> * Because 2.7 will be running production applications, a policy
>  decision was made to silence warnings only of interest to developers
>  by default.  Silencing :exc:`DeprecationWarning` and its descendants
>  prevents users from seeing warnings triggered by an application.
>  (Carried out in :issue:`7319`.)
>
>  You can re-enable display of :exc:`DeprecationWarning` messages by
>  running Python with the :option:`-Wdefault` (short form:
>  :option:`-Wd`) switch, or you can add
>  ``warnings.simplefilter('default')`` to your code.

All this sounds fine to me. Thanks for taking the time to write this!

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