Recently, Guido van Rossum <guido@digicool.com> said:

Sobering thought: It's possible, given all the other changes that I'm thinking about, that it just won't be possible to make Python 2.2 fully backwards compatible. Should we rename it to 3.0? Forget about the changes? Label it as experimental and encourage ISPs to install it as an "alternative" version, only available by using "python2.2"?

In this respect you should also think of the people Embedding/extending Python. From the checkin messages I get the impression that all the new inheritance stuff could well break things there, and if you're going to break, say, pyapache or somesuch then a major version jump may well be called for... -- Jack Jansen | ++++ stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal ++++ Jack.Jansen@oratrix.com | ++++ if you agree copy these lines to your sig ++++ www.oratrix.nl/~jack | see http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/spg-l/sigaction.htm