[Python-Dev] Python 3.0.1

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> Don't take the word "experimental" too seriously.  It's clearly an
> exaggeration given the current state of 3.0.x.  What is meant is an
> explicit announcement that the stability rules chosen in response to
> the bool-True-False brouhaha will be relaxed for the 3.0.x series
> *only*.

The name for that shouldn't be "experimental", though. I don't think
it needs any name at all. It would be sufficient to report, in the
release announcement, and some stuff got removed in an incompatible
way. This is also different from bool-True-False, which was an
addition, not a removal.

> I think that the important question is "can the 3.0.x series be made
> 'viable' in less than the time frame for 3.1?"  If not, I really have
> to think it's DOA from the point of view of folks who consider 3.0.0
> non-viable.  I think that's what Barry and Martin are saying.

DOA == dead on arrival? I don't think Python 3.0 is dead. Instead, I
think it is fairly buggy, but those bugs can be fixed. Removal of stuff
is *not* a bug fix, of course.

The *real* bugs in 3.0 is stuff like "IDLE doesn't work", "bdist_wininst
doesn't work", etc.

I personally can agree with removal of stuff (despite it not being
a bug fix). However, more importantly, I want to support respective
authority. If the release manager sets a policy on what is and what
is not acceptable for a bug fix release, every committer should
implement this policy (or at least not actively break it).

With the removals in the code, I do think it is important to release
3.0.1 quickly, like, say, next week.

> The key point is that new features in 3.1 are generally going to be
> considered less reliable than those inherited from 3.0, and thus a
> debugged 3.0, even if the implementations have been unstable, provides
> a way for the very demanding to determine what that set is, and to
> test how it behaves in their applications.

That is fairly abstract. What specific bugs in Python 3.0 are you
talking about?

Regards,
Martin