[Python-Dev] Re: Stability and change

[Paul Prescod]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> 
>...
> 
> I didn't say that.  NumPy has exactly the same issues.  

We've lost the thread of discussion and are now in the land of wasted
breath, but just in case you are curious how we got here...

Fred said: "Keeping PyXML compatible with old versions of Python is a
pain."

Then he said: "It's enough to make me think that Andrew was right about
including XML in Python." 

To me, that's a non sequiter. PyXML has the same backwards compatibility
headache as any other third party module. If I had a module called
PyGraphs that needed weak references, I would have a problem if I wanted
it to work on Python 2.0 or 1.5.2.

Then you said: "Yeah, we only included XML because some people were very
vocal about including it for political reasons." Of course I was one of
those people so I still wanted to get to the bottom of this non
sequiter. 

PyXML would have exactly the same backwards compatibility headaches if
there were no XML support in Python whatsoever. It's just a problem that
third party modules have. You either endure the pain or you make your
users upgrade to a new version of Python. As far as I can tell, those
are the only two choices.

 Paul Prescod