<br><div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">For example, I committed a fix for urllib that made it raise IOError instead<br>of an AttributeError (which wasn't explicitly raised, of course) if a certain
<br>error condition occurs.<br><br>This is changed behavior too, but if we are to postpone all these fixes<br>to 3.0, we won't have half of the fixes in Python 2.6 that are there now.</blockquote><div><br>There's a big difference between that change and this one; that change is 'loud'. It makes noise. It's raising an exception: that exception will either be handled or will propagate up the stack and be noticed somewhere.
<br><br>I *think* (ahem.. I read minds...) the problem people are having with this particular change is the fact that the behavior of this function is being changed in a way that is completely silent. Code written to expect one kind of result are now getting a different kind of result... instead of having an error thrown, a warning given, or something explicit... it's just different now.
<br><br>And it'd be so easy to do it in a way which wouldn't be silent... just throw out a warning, and defer the actual change until the next release. <br><br>Expecting people to keep on top of Misc/NEWS and re-read the documentation for every function in their code is a tad unreasonable. I don't personally find it unreasonable for people to ask for a bit more of an extended migration path when changes that are being implemented will cause *silent* changes in behavior.
<br><br>It's been very hard for my company to move from 2.3 to 2.4 as a development platform as it is, which we're just barely doing now... for this reason I'm paying a lot more attention to -dev lately to be prepared for
2.6 and beyond. Not everyone has the time to do that.. there's a lot of messages :) And Misc/NEWS is *huge*. Warnings are a very useful mechanism for semi-painless migrations and upgrades... <br><br>(And, if I thought it'd have any chance of going in, I'd submit a patch to add a warning and adjust docs/tests/etc... but this issue seems ever so divided...)
<br><br>--S<br></div><br></div>