I have thought that 2.7 was now to come out instead with 3.2 and would include backported 3.2 new features. Others expect 2.7 to come out soon after 3.1 and to only contain new 3.1 features. So Guido or someone, please clarify: is 2.7 to be the counterpart of 3.1 or 3.2?
Neither, nor. 2.7 will be released 18..24 months after 2.6, i.e. between April 2010 and October 2010. I think it's too early to speculate about a release schedule for 3.2.
3.2
At some point, 3.x will become the "trunk" branch. It seems to me that this should be done with 3.2 as part of the transition to Mercurial.
I'm not sure that the concept of a "trunk" branch still exists in Mercurial. PEP 385 apparently doesn't have resolved the branch strategy for Mercurial yet. With cloned branches, I think the concept of a "trunk" becomes irrelevant.
A. As long as 2.x is 'trunk', some people will view 3.x as 'experimental'. That was true for 3.0, but (much?) less so for 3.1. Is there any known reason why 3.2 should not soon be considered and treated as the main development version, to become the main production version?
B. All new features will go into 3.2. Only some will be backported to 2.x. So it seems that the flow should be to develop for 3.2 and maybe backport thereafter.
What about bug fixes? How will they flow?
2.final
Is there any thought of making 2.7 be 2.final?
Yes. Whether or not a 2.8 release will happen hasn't been decided yet, but 2.7 may well be the last 2.x release.
B. Do we really want to encourage library developers to put their 'upgrade to a new version' energy into 2.x to 2.x+1 upgrades, rather than a 2.x to 3.y upgrades?
IMO, it's much up to the contributors. If the regular committers want to continue to work on 2.x, and a release manager is found to create releases, we can continue to release 2.8, and perhaps 2.9. However, I think at this point, it is too early to discuss that - 2.7 is still many months ahead. Regards, Martin