[Python-Dev] What's New text on future maintenance

[A.M. Kuchling]

FYI: I've just added the text below to the "What's New" document for
2.7.  I wanted to describe how 2.7 will probably be maintained, but
didn't want to write anything that sounded like an iron-clad guarantee
of a maintenance timespan.  Does this text seem like a reasonable set
of statements?

--amk

Python 2.7 is intended to be the last major release in the 2.x series.
Though more major releases have not been absolutely ruled out, the
Python maintainers are planning to focus their efforts on Python 3.x.

This means that 2.7 will remain in place for a long time, running
production systems that have not been ported to Python 3.x.
Two consequences of the long-term significance of 2.7 are:

* It's very likely the 2.7 release will have a longer period of
  maintenance compared to earlier 2.x versions.  Python 2.7 will
  continue to be maintained while the transition to 3.x is in
  progress, and that transition will itself be lengthy.  Most 2.x
  versions are maintained for about 4 years, from the first to the
  last bugfix release; patchlevel releases for Python 2.7 will
  probably be made for at least 6 years.

* Because 2.7 will be running production applications, a policy
  decision was made to silence warnings only of interest to developers
  by default.  Silencing :exc:`DeprecationWarning` and its descendants
  prevents users from seeing warnings triggered by an application.
  (Carried out in :issue:`7319`.)

  You can re-enable display of :exc:`DeprecationWarning` messages by
  running Python with the :option:`-Wdefault` (short form:
  :option:`-Wd`) switch, or you can add
  ``warnings.simplefilter('default')`` to your code.