[Python-Dev] Release Schedules (was Stability & change)

[Guido van Rossum]

> Alex Martelli <aleax@aleax.it> writes:
> 
> > Giving strip methods an optional arguments, the characters that
> > are OK to throw away (stopping the stripping when a
> > not-to-be-thrown- away character shows up -- defaulting to
> > whitespace like now of course), would help here and also with
> > other related issues such as emulating Perl's "chomp".  I also
> > think it's the kind of change that would be OK in a minor release
> > in the stable branch.
> 
> This is http://python.org/sf/444708.

Which I'll reopen, because this is the first good use case for that
suggestion I've seen.

Alex is sounding much like me now (i.e., we've lured him over to our
side :-): str() of some expressions will change, but it's "OK in a
minor release" since we can provide a nice way to deal with the
effect.  Never mind that code that deals with this in the traditional
way *will* break silently (displaying numbers that are a factor 10 too
small!), which IMO is worse than the worst effect of str(1==1)
changing (at least that'll fail with an error when it fails).  Not
that I disagree, but I expect that if this happens to break Paul
Rubin's code (to use a random example :-), all hell will break loose.

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