[Python-Dev] Status of 2.7 and 3.2

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> I have thought that 2.7 was now to come out instead with 3.2 and would
> include backported 3.2 new features.  Others expect 2.7 to come out soon
> after 3.1 and to only contain new 3.1 features.  So Guido or someone,
> please clarify: is 2.7 to be the counterpart of 3.1 or 3.2?

Neither, nor. 2.7 will be released 18..24 months after 2.6, i.e. between
April 2010 and October 2010. I think it's too early to speculate about
a release schedule for 3.2.

> 3.2
> 
> At some point, 3.x will become the "trunk" branch.  It seems to me that
> this should be done with 3.2 as part of the transition to Mercurial.

I'm not sure that the concept of a "trunk" branch still exists in
Mercurial. PEP 385 apparently doesn't have resolved the branch strategy
for Mercurial yet. With cloned branches, I think the concept of a
"trunk" becomes irrelevant.

> A. As long as 2.x is 'trunk', some people will view 3.x as
> 'experimental'.  That was true for 3.0, but (much?) less so for 3.1.  Is
> there any known reason why 3.2 should not soon be considered and treated
> as the main development version, to become the main production version?
> 
> B. All new features will go into 3.2.  Only some will be backported to
> 2.x.  So it seems that the flow should be to develop for 3.2 and maybe
> backport thereafter.

What about bug fixes? How will they flow?

> 2.final
> 
> Is there any thought of making 2.7 be 2.final?

Yes. Whether or not a 2.8 release will happen hasn't been decided yet,
but 2.7 may well be the last 2.x release.

> B. Do we really want to encourage library developers to put their
> 'upgrade to a new version' energy into 2.x to 2.x+1 upgrades, rather
> than a 2.x to 3.y upgrades?

IMO, it's much up to the contributors. If the regular committers
want to continue to work on 2.x, and a release manager is found
to create releases, we can continue to release 2.8, and perhaps
2.9. However, I think at this point, it is too early to discuss
that - 2.7 is still many months ahead.

Regards,
Martin