[python-committers] PyCon Language Summit: Wednesday 9th April

M.-A. Lemburg mal at egenix.com
Thu Dec 5 00:22:02 CET 2013


On 05.12.2013 00:03, Brian Curtin wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 2:47 PM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
>>> Can you clarify on some specific interesting cases you ran into?
>>
>> One example is users stuck on e.g. Zope 2.10 or Plone 3.3 (or even
>> earlier). They cannot upgrade because they are using customized
>> installations and don't have the knowledge or resources to upgrade
>> the systems to later versions.
> 
> 
> Writing intentionally unmaintainable software and being locked into it is a
> different issue than platforms providing long-dead Python versions. If you
> do bad things, you're going to have a bad time.

I'm not sure I follow.

Like many other systems, Zope and Plone only support a few Python
versions for each release. If you want to upgrade to later
Python versions, you have to upgrade to newer Zope and Plone
versions as well.

Now, unlike Python 2, the changes for those new versions are
often significant, so add-ons or customizations written
for the version you have installed (often) don't work anymore
in newer releases (also because these systems tend to have
shorter release cycles and switch major versions more frequently
than Python).

Just like with OSes shipping older Python releases, you are
therefore stuck with a system that only runs on older Python
releases. This is not the same as intentionally writing
unmaintainable software. If you can't keep up with a system's
release cycle, you fall behind, and there may be many reasons
for this to happen, e.g. no budget, people changing jobs, the
application being feature complete and in maintenance mode -
until one day someone does need a new feature, etc.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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