[python-committers] My cavalier and aggressive manner, API change and bugs introduced for basically zero benefit

[Nick Coghlan]

On 21 January 2017 at 23:32, Antoine Pitrou <antoine at python.org> wrote:
>
> Le 21/01/2017 à 12:27, Nick Coghlan a écrit :
>>
>> The Red Hat python-maint folks (Peter Viktorin et al) similarly tried
>> to time things so there was a window to provide feedback from Fedora
>> Rawhide on a beta release prior to the final 3.6.0 release, but it
>> unfortunately ended up not being practical, especially with the lack
>> of clarity around when the 3.6 ABI would actually be frozen.
>>
>> That uncertainty around the release ABI stability also impacted the
>> ability of the manylinux folks to include any of the 3.6 pre-releases
>> in their reference build environment.
>
> Normally, our "only bug fixes after the 1st beta" should more or less
> guarantee ABI stability, but in practice that policy is very frequently
> broken by well-meaning core developers.

In the case of the 3.6 beta cycle, there were genuinely some ABI fixes
needed after 3.6b1, so I don't think 3.x.0b1 is the right time to
declare "we expect all binary extension modules built with this
version to work with 3.x.0".

It does seem reasonable to lock it down around beta 3, though - at
that point we've had time for people to do some test builds against a
stable API, as well as an initial iteration of fixes for identified
regressions.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia