[Python-Dev] public visibility of python-dev decisions "before it's too late"

[Guido van Rossum]

On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 7:14 PM, Lennart Regebro <regebro at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 21:54, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
>> I don't know what other core devs, but I don't think this discussion is
>> going anywhere. If porting the ZTK is a burden for you, perhaps you
>> should try to find some financial support for it (or let other people
>> do it for you), rather than accusing the python-dev community.
>
> Up until the reactions from the core Python developers on these real
> world problems, it was hard work, but also fun. It isn't anymore, and
> I hear your message, loud and clear, so indeed, somebody else will
> have to do it. I've lost interest.

This is unfortunate (and the PyCon sprints aren't even over!).

I think Lennart's complaint has *some* validity. I think PEP 5 did not
anticipate two overlapping lines of development, and in retrospect it
was unwise to kill the offending API in 3.2 (even if it is *possible*
to deal with it, it's cumbersome).

But I do not think that there is a way to undo the damage that was
done; putting the missing API back in 3.2.1 will cause other problems
(because it would break compatibility between 3.2 and 3.2.1). So
Lennart will have to put up with the pragmatics of supporting 2.7 and
3.2 (and others as he desires). But we should learn from the
experience and be more cautious with 3.3.

Fortunately there may not be any more such cases since no new major
versions of Python 2 will be released. So I'm not sure what an update
of PEP 5 will buy us.

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