[Python-Dev] "Unstable" is an ambiguous word...

[Guido van Rossum]

> > > I also like Andrew's idea of making everybody commit their changes in
> > > both branches -- to scale the effort of keeping the maintenance branch
> > > up-to-date.
> > 
> > For bug fixes, I encourage that. The question will come up whether new
> > features also need to be back-ported.
> 
> There's a couple of simple cases:
> 
>   . Obvious bugs that should be backported. Where possible, the original
> committer should apply this.
> 
>   . Obvious new features that introduce new behaviour. This is something 
> that shouldn't be applied automatically, but _if_ the feature is something
> that should be considered for the stable release then that should be 
> flagged in the comment, but not applied to the branch straight away.

I just applied a patch to typeobject.c that makes the x[y] operation
three times faster when type(x) is a subclass of list that doesn't
override __getitem__.  This isn't a bug, so I didn't even think of
considering it for 2.2.1 -- but now I'm seriously rethinking that, and
it will probably end up in 2.2.2, since it also doesn't introduce any
incompatible behavior (assuming there aren't any bugs in the patch :-).

But this is a serious amount of extra work -- as part of the change, I
refactored some code, etc.

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