Moving towards Python 3.0 (was Re: [Python-Dev] Speed up function calls)

[Brett C.]

Neal Norwitz wrote:
> On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 09:47:41 -0500, Raymond Hettinger <python at rcn.com> wrote:
> 
[SNIP]
> Any ideas how we could start to realize some benefits of Py3.0 before
> it arrives?  I'm not sure if this is worth it, if it's premature, or
> if there are other ways to acheive the goal of easing transition for
> users and simplifying developers tasks (by spreading over a longer
> period of time) and reducing the possibility of not fixing warts.
> 

The way I always imagined Python 3.0 would come about would be through preview 
releases.  Once the final 2.x version was released and went into maintennance 
we would start developing Python 3.0 .  During that development, when a major 
semantic change was checked in and seemed to work we could do a quick preview 
release for people to use to see if the new features up to that preview release 
would break their code.

Any other way, though, through concurrent development, seems painful.  As you 
mentioned, Neal, branches require merges eventually and that can be painful.  I 
suspect people will just have to put up with a longer dev time for Python 3.0 . 
  That longer dev time might actually be a good thing in the end.  It would 
enable us to really develop a very stable 2.x version of Python that we all 
know will be in use for quite some time by old code.

-Brett