"TW" == Thomas Wouters <thomas@xs4all.net> writes:
TW> That is not something you can sell very easily, Barry. From
TW> the perspective of providing a service to a lot of third
TW> parties, with at best a varying cluelevel, upgrading is a very
TW> scary thing. I may seem very conservative on python-dev,
TW> wrt. backwards compatibility, but I assure you I'm quite the
TW> radical compared to some people, and compared to myself when
TW> considering upgrades on production platforms :)Upgrading sucks. It always breaks something, and the only way to avoid that is to never upgrade! But I can appreciate the sentiment. I think it was Jakob Neilsen who said, when he was talking about the rate that users upgrade their browsers, that it takes about 2 years to get the majority of users to upgrade to a new version. If Python adoption follows the same curve, I suspect that we'll still see significant Python 1.5.2 usage for another 18 months or so. :}
TW> Nevertheless I do think Debian is going a bit over the wall in
TW> this case, since they have a very clear distinction between
TW> stable, testing and unstable trees. They could certainly
TW> switch python to python2 in the unstable tree, since it'll be
TW> some time before that tree is going into testing, and more yet
TW> before it's stable.I don't keep up on Debian release procedures, but that sounds like the right approach to me.
TW> It may have something to do with the missing readline support
TW> in python2, though -- the disabling of modules people might
TW> depend on falls under backwards compatibility again :)And now we're back to the licensing issues. Which suck worse than anything else. I'd rather be debating the merits of indentation for blocking with a devote obfuscated C code hacker than sit in another room with lawyers debating licenses.
-Barry