On 19. 11. 21 22:15, Mike Miller wrote:
This is the point where the pricey support contract comes in. Would give options to those who need it and provide some revenue.
Not really; for a pricey support contract would need to freeze things for even longer -- *and* make it an actual contract :) Changing working code just to make it continue to work with a newer Python version is boring. Companies might pay money to not have to do that. Or they might pay their employees to do the work. Either way it's money that could be spent on better things. (And hopefully, in some cases those things will be investing into Python and its ecosystem.) But it's similar with volunteer authors and maintainers of various tools and libraries, who "pay" with their time that could be spent building something useful (or something fun). I believe that each time we force them to do pointless updates in their code, we sap some joy and enthusiasm from the ecosystem. Of course, we need to balance that with the joy and enthusiasm (and yes, corporate money) that core devs pour into improving Python itself. But it's the users that we're making Python for.
Otherwise, the "there's no such thing as a free lunch," factor takes precedence.
That cuts both ways: deleting old ugly code is enjoyable, but it isn't free ;) Full disclosure: I do work for Red Hat, which makes money on pricey support contracts. But Victor Stinner also works here. This thread was motivated by watching rebuilds of Fedora packages with Python 3.11 (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2016048), and asking myself if all the work we're expecting people to do is worth it.