[Python-Dev] Re: Stability and change

[Guido van Rossum]

> That tide's only the linux users, and the linux users who care what 
> kernel they're running. I'm an ex-sysadmin, pretty solid unix geek, 
> and I nowadays run whatever my distro comes with - as long as it 
> supports what I want to do, I don't care. I don't think that saying 
> "it's what linux does" is enough to carry the day by itself. I suspect 
> that if you want to go with the flow, we should follow the approach that 
> Microsoft uses to mark their unstable releases. (And I'm _not_ going to 
> use any one of the many, many cheap shots about unstable MS releases 
> that I have in my head here - feel free to substitute your own. :)

Cheap shots aside, another possibility would be to simply start
*every* minor (2.x) release off as unstable, releasing frequent
experimental micro (2.x.y) releases as a substitute for alpha/beta
releases, and then at some point declare it stable.  At that point,
the previous stable release (2.(x-1)) becomes deprecated and largely
unmaintained (except for backporting some killer bugs -- the mode we
seem to be in for 2.1.3 already), 2.x starts issueing micro releases
that mostly fix bugs or add very non-controversial features, and
2.(x+1) is started for new development.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)