[Python-Dev] 2.5 issues need resolving in a few days

[Fred L. Drake, Jr.]

On Friday 09 June 2006 10:28, Guido van Rossum wrote:
 > Really? The old situation is really evil, and the new approach is at
 > least marginally better by giving users a way to migrate to a new
 > non-evil approach. What exactly is the backwards incompatibility you
 > speak of?

The "incompatibility" depends on your point of view for this one.  I don't 
think there is any for client code; you get the old behavior for the "xml" 
package, and predictable behavior for the "xmlcore" package.

Martin's objection is that the sources for the "xmlcore" package can no longer 
be shared with the PyXML project.  I understand that he wants to reduce the 
cost of maintaining two trees for what's essentially the same code.  I played 
with some ideas for making the tree more agnostic to where it "really" lives, 
but wasn't particularly successful.

When I was working on that, I found that the PyXML unit tests weren't passing.  
I didn't have time to pursue that, though.  On the whole, I'm unconvinced 
that there's value in continuing to worry about being able to copy the source 
tree between the two projects at this time.  There's almost no effort going 
into PyXML any more, as far as I can tell.  In that light, the maintenance 
cost seems irrelevant compared to not finally solving the fundamental problem 
of magic in the "xml" package import.

I must consider the problem a nice-to-solve issue rather than a particularly 
important issue.  All the benefit is for PyXML, and shouldn't really impact 
Python releases.


  -Fred

-- 
Fred L. Drake, Jr.   <fdrake at acm.org>