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

[Terry Reedy]

On 5/6/2010 9:50 PM, A.M. Kuchling wrote:
> 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.

Actually, bugfix releases generally stop with the next major release, 
with about a 2 year interval. I agree with others about condensing, to 
something like:

"Python 2.7 is intended to be the last major release in the 2.x series.
Python core developers plan to focus future 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. Bugfix 
releases will likely continue for 5 years."

Then the warnings stuff
>
> * Because 2.7 will be running production applications, a policy

Every major version (xcept 3.0) has run production application, and 3.1 
may be and 3.2 certainly will be. So this reasoning is not clear to me.

>    decision was made to silence warnings only of interest to developers
>    by default.

I believe this is meant to say "Warnings aimed only at those porting 
code to 3.x are silenced 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.

Terry Jan Reedy