[Python-Dev] Re: ATTENTION! Releasing Python 2.2.2 in a few weeks

[Guido van Rossum]

> > > But given your current plan to release in a few weeks, I wonder if my
> > > task might be better changed from tracing all the changes from the
> > > last release to 2.2 maintenance, to starting from 2.2 maint and
> > > seeing if there is something we _don't_ want in, which needs removing.
> > > I still don't have a good enough perspective to judge this.
> > 
> > I very much doubt that anything would have crept into 2.2 cvs that we
> > don't want.  Or are you talking from the PBF POV and could they be
> > more conservative for Py-tie than we've been with 2.2.2?
> 
> I sure don't think so.   But it looks now to me as if the new plan of
> attack for making a PyTie release is to start with 2.2.2 and then see
> what absolutely needs to be added to that, as opposed to my old approach,
> which was to trace from 2.2.1 until 2.3 labelling things that _shouldn't_
> be included.  Does this make sense, or was my old plan of attack better?

I would never have suggested labeling things that *shouldn't* be
included; it's better to label things that *should* be included.
Whether your criteria for inclusion is "absolutely must have" or
"would be nice" depends on how much time you have and what the PBF's
real goal is.

I would suggest that if your primary goal is stability, being
conservative is probably right; everything that's not very clearly a
pure bugfix should be frowned upon.

> > Can you tell us more here about the Py-tie plans?  I know nothing
> > about it except that it'll be based on Python 2.2; I think it would be
> > helpful for the developer community to know what the long-term Py-tie
> > plans are.
> 
> If there is consensus that making Py-Tie out of 2.2.2 plus a list
> of things that have to be added/fixed, then the thing to do is to
> start the Snake Farm testing 2.2maints.  Then we need to get a list
> of what software that isn't part of the standard library should be
> included in PyTie.  Then we have to test that against the PyTie candidate.
> We're working on a way to add that to the snakefarm builds now.  The
> long term plans are to fix serious bugs in the release if they should be
> discovered, not only in Python but in any third party modules.  Also
> we are working on how to license the whole thing, given that every
> extra bit has its own particular license.  

Thanks.  In addition, I was hoping to hear about your timeline (when
do you expect to release PyTie?) and a hint on the 3rd party packages
you're thinking of adding.  Also a list of target platforms for which
PyTie must absolutely work.  (Note e.g. that we just discovered a
problem with Solaris and the latest version of binutils (2.13), which
seems to be used by the latest GCC version (3.2 IIRC) but is also
separately downloadable.  The bug is in binutils 2.13.  Is this
*combination* (Solaris + binutils 2.13) a target platform?  If so, you
might want to use a different approach than we plan to do for Python
2.3 and 2.2.2 (which is merely to bail out if a certain test dumps
core during configuration).

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