[Python-Dev] Bazaar branches available (again) on Launchpad

[Nick Coghlan]

David Lyon wrote:
> On 2; Who knows what their life cycle is. CVS is pretty much
>       dead, and svn looks like it is on the way out.
>       I can't think of how anything could be better than
>       mercurial or bzr but I know I will be proved wrong.

I believe you misunderstood what Matthieu meant by life cycle there:
think "release cycle". If a project pushes out new releases
significantly more often than every 18-24 months (as is currently true
for all of the major SCM tools), then that fact alone makes it a very
bad fit for the Python standard library.

And centralised source control will be going strong for years. The DVCS
approach may be great for the open source world, but the gains are far
more limited in a closed source shop (especially a group writing
internal corporate applications which doesn't need to keep many, if any,
maintenance branches going).

If we weren't dealing with 4 active branches, the DVCS discussion would
have got a lot less traction with the core developers - aside from
better handling of multiple lines of development, most of the benefits
of the switch to a DVCS accrue to people without commit access to the
SVN repository.

Anyway, we've wandered far afield from legit python-dev topics now. Any
further ideas about super_mega_easy_install functionality that can pull
code from source control systems and build it rather than requiring
prebuild source tarballs should be directed to python-ideas (they
probably need to bake more even before they make an appearance on
distutils-sig).

Cheers,
Nick.

P.S. As Jesse said... your enthusiasm is great, but please don't assume
that some inherent conservatism on the part of other developers is
automatically evil or the result of a failure to see your point. A lot
of people around the world rely on our stuff every day. We owe it to
them to be measured in our actions and to put serious thought into any
major changes or additions we make to the language and the standard
library. For the current stage of its development, Python 3 is in a good
place from our point of view - its major carrot has really always been
the better Unicode support it offers, and the ever-increasing
globalisation of the web will create more and more pressure pushing
developers in that direction as the years go by. Sure, Python 3 cleans
up assorted other things as well, but the change to the text processing
model is the big one that is fundamentally incompatible with the
architecture of the 2.x series. Compared to that change, everything else
is just tinkering.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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