[Python-Dev] Re: PEP 328 -- relative and multi-line import

[Aahz]

On Sat, Apr 10, 2004, Bill Janssen wrote:
>Andrew Koenig:
>>
>> I do wish to caution against assuming the problem is trivial.
> 
> I've been down this road myself, and I think I understand the
> problem.  However, whenever I've made changes of this break-itude,
> I've always done it in a major release.  Changing things this way
> in a minor release just seems hostile to me.  Remember that one of
> the major reasons people use Python (instead of, say, Scheme) is the
> availability of lots of packages written in Python to do various
> things.  Making those packages buggy is a suboptimal way to win
> friends and influence people.

Python's version changes from 2.0 through 2.3 have all been considered
"major" releases, as will the upcoming 2.4 release.  Ditto 1.4 to 1.5
(haven't been involved with Python long enough to know about earlier
releases).  For that matter, 1.5 to 1.5.1 to 1.5.2 contained a fair
number of major changes, which led to the creation of PEP 6.  The jump
from 1.5 to 1.6 to 2.0 was overall driven more by politics than technical
issues.

Although we talk about plans for Python 3.0, that's very much a
pie-in-the-sky release at this point, and that will likely contain about
as much breakage as going from FORTRAN II to Fortran 77.

I don't see anyone else considering this a major issue in this case as
long as we allot a sufficiently long timeline (and if you search the
records, I'm generally one of the people more likely to raise objections
about causing old code to fail).  If you want to pursue this angle, I
think you should go to c.l.py to see if anyone agrees with you.
-- 
Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com)           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

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