[Python-Dev] Continuing 2.x

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> Right now, Kristján is burning off his (non-fungible) enthusiasm in this
> discussion rather than addressing more 2.x maintenance issues.  If 3.x
> adoption takes off and makes a nice hockey stick graph, then few people
> will care about this in retrospect.  In the intervening hypothetical
> half-century while we wait to see how it pans out, isn't it better to
> just have an official Python branch for the "maybe 2.8" release?  Nobody
> from the current core team needs to work on it, necessarily; either
> other, new maintainers will show up or they won't.  For that matter,
> Kristján is still talking about porting much of his work to 3.x anyway.

That might be - however, I think it is (now) clear that talking about
this on python-dev isn't going to make it happen, at least not now.
Nobody has really stepped forward to manage a Python 2.8 project;
more specifically, Kristjan explicitly said that he will *not* do
a Python 2.8 release.

As Brett (IMHO correctly) analyzed: Kristjan wants a fork, a place
where he can publish his Python changes. Not sure if anybody else
has that desire, but if so, these people should get together and set
something up. As for the specific implementation of the fork: people
proposed that Kristjan should wait for the hg switchover, and can
then easily host the fork anywhere (e.g. on bitbucket, or as a private
clone on python.org). Assuming there are other contributors (outside
of python-committers) to this fork as well, hosting it on bitbucket
is probably easier since it will allow to give push permissions to
non-core committers.

> I'm perfectly willing to admit that I'm still too pessimistic about this
> and I could be wrong.  But given the relatively minimal amount of effort
> required to let 2.x bugs continue to get fixed under the aegis of
> Python.org

I think here you are strongly mistaken. It is not a relatively minimal
effort. Having to support another branch would be very very painful.

> it seems foolhardy to insist that those of us who think 2.x is
> going to necessitate another release must /necessarily/ be wrong.

Predictions are always difficult to make. It may be that 2.x will
necessitate another release (by some criteria), but I truly hope
that you are wrong in predicting that such a release will actually
happen.

Regards,
Martin