[Python-Dev] Maintaining old releases

["Martin v. Löwis"]

>> Because there won't typically be sufficient testing and release
>> infrastructure to allow arbitrary bug fixes to be committed on the
>> branch. The buildbots are turned off, and nobody tests the release
>> candidate, no Windows binaries are provided - thus, chances are very
>> high that a bug fix release for some very old branch will be *worse*
>> than the previous release, rather than better.
> 
> Second, I don't think this is true. People using those patch
> level releases will test and report bugs if they are introduced
> by such backports.

They might be using releases, but they are *not* using the subversion
maintenance branches. Do you know anybody who regularly checks out the
2.4 maintenance branch and tests it?

So at best, people will only report bugs *after* the release was made,
meaning that there is a realistic chance that the release itself breaks
things.

As for using the releases themselves: there have been 80462 downloads
of 2.4.5 since it was released in March, as compared to 517325 downloads
of the 2.5.2 MSI in July alone. So I'm skeptical that many people do
actually use the 2.4.5 release.

> Besides, developers backporting such changes are diligent enough
> to test their changes - they will usually have a reason for applying
> the extra effort to backport.

My problem is that this backporting is not systematic. It's arbitrary
whether patches get backported or not. Part of the problem is that
it is/was also unclear whether there ever will be another release made
out of 2.4. When 2.4.4 was released, Anthony announced, in

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2006-October/069326.html

"This will be the last planned release in the Python 2.4 series"

So anybody committing to the 2.4 branch after that should have expected
that the patches will never get released.

Regards,
Martin