[Python-Dev] Deprecation policy

[Benjamin Peterson]

2011/11/29 Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com>:
> On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 1:13 AM, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
>> On Nov 29, 2011, at 01:59 PM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
>>
>>>Well, that's why I think the version number components are not
>>>correctly named. I don't think any of the 2.x or 3.x releases can be
>>>called "minor" by any stretch of the word. A quick glance at
>>>http://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/index.html should be enough.
>>
>> Agreed, but it's too late to change it.  I look at it as the attributes of the
>> namedtuple being evocative of the traditional names for the digit positions,
>> not the assignment of those positions to Python's semantics.
>
> Hmm, I wonder about that. Perhaps we could add a second set of names
> in parallel with the "major.minor.micro" names:
> "series.feature.maint".
>
> That would, after all, reflect what is actually said in practice:
> - release series: 2.x, 3.x  (usually used in a form like "In the 3.x
> series, X is true. In 2.x, Y is true)
> - feature release: 2.7, 3.2, etc
> - maintenance release: 2.7.2, 3.2.1, etc
>
> I know I tend to call feature releases major releases and I'm far from
> alone in that. The discrepancy in relation to sys.version_info is
> confusing, but we can't make 'major' refer to a different field
> without breaking existing programs. But we *can* change:
>
>>>> sys.version_info
> sys.version_info(major=2, minor=7, micro=2, releaselevel='final', serial=0)
>
> to instead read:
>
> sys.version_info(series=2, feature=7, maint=2, releaselevel='final', serial=0)
>
> while allowing 'major' as an alias of 'series', 'minor' as an alias of
> 'feature' and 'micro' as an alias of 'maint'. Nothing breaks, and we'd
> have started down the path towards coherent terminology for the three
> fields in the version numbers (by accepting that 'major' has now
> become irredeemably ambiguous in the context of CPython releases).
>
> This idea of renaming all three fields has come up before, but I
> believe we got stuck on the question of what to call the first number
> (i.e. the one I'm calling the "series" here).

Can we drop this now? Too much effort for very little benefit. We call
releases what we call releases.



-- 
Regards,
Benjamin