Tarek Ziadé writes:
If the maintainer of unittest for example, provides an upgrade for this package, don't you think we can trust that he will provide a more stable upgrade for the unittest package in the stdlib than another project that would implement a unittest package ?
For the users who really care about this, it's not a question of relative stability. Either the only changes in documented behavior involve successful completion of jobs that used to fail, or instability has been introduced. For many people (though a small fraction) that is *very bad*, and they have complained vociferously in the past. I really don't understand where the big benefits are to having minor improvements introduced in bugfix releases. People who want those benefits should upgrade to a more recent series. The people who really need them but must stick to an older series for Python itself can get the most recent version of the few packages that have "must-have" improvements from PyPI. "No behavior changes in micro releases" is an easily understood, reasonably easily followed policy. The policy you propose requires judgment calls that will differ from module maintainer to module maintainer, and every upgrade will involve discussion on python-dev. Yuck.