[python-committers] Updated schedule for Python 3.4

[Nick Coghlan]

On 17 Jan 2014 01:02, "Kristján Valur Jónsson" <kristjan at ccpgames.com>
wrote:
>
> The hope is that by not adding features to 2.x, people will flock around
3.x en masse :)

Very few of us think that way - it's that we think Python 3 is a better
language in most ways, and it is certainly much easier and more pleasant to
work on, which matters a great deal for something many of us are doing as a
side project outside work hours. I personally get very annoyed by snide
remarks like this suggesting that four years of parallel feature
development and eight years of parallel maintenance on a volunteer driven
project *aren't enough*.

Would you have preferred a Gnome or KDE style transition where the parallel
development periods were measured in months rather than years?

Open source projects are innately engineering driven, and thus vastly less
tolerant of long term technical debt than commercial enterprises that can
offer additional financial incentives to tolerate working with old code for
backwards compatibility reasons. That's *why* a company like Red Hat can
continue to support Python 2.7 out to 2023+, even though upstream community
support will end in 2015 - people don't maintain and support old platforms
like RHEL3 for fun, we do it because we get *paid*.

CCP could have stepped in at any time and proposed funding (or organising
funding for) a full Python 2.8 release after it became clear that
python-dev wasn't going to do it voluntarily, but they, like every other
commercial entity, realised doing so was likely not to be cost effective
given the preferences of upstream and the extended life cycle of 2.7. It
sounds like they may be changing their mind as 2015 nears and the idea of
Stackless 2.8 is considered, but that's exactly the way open source
*should* work.

Regards,
Nick.

> K
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: "Martin v. Löwis" [mailto:martin at v.loewis.de]
> Sent: 16. janúar 2014 20:19
> To: Kristján Valur Jónsson; Matthias Klose; python-committers at python.org
> Subject: Re: [python-committers] Updated schedule for Python 3.4
>
> The hope is that, instead of sitting idle, they actually start working on
bugs, and contributing to finishing the release.
>
>
>
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> python-committers mailing list
> python-committers at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
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