[Python-Dev] PEP 407: New release cycle and introducing long-term support versions

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Antoine Pitrou writes:

 > > Since testing is the bottleneck on what users consider to be
 > > "available for me", you cannot decrease the amount of testing (alpha,
 > > beta releases) by anywhere near the amount you're increasing
 > > frequency, or you're just producing "as is" snapshots.
 > 
 > The point is to *increase* the amount of testing by making features
 > available in stable releases on a more frequent basis. Not decrease
 > it.

We're talking about different kinds of testing.  You're talking about
(what old-school commercial software houses meant by "beta") testing
in a production or production prototype environment.  I'd love to see
more of that, too!  My claim is that I don't expect much uptake if you
don't do close to as many of what are called "alpha" and "beta" tests
on python-dev as are currently done.

 > Alphas and betas never produce much feedback, because people are
 > reluctant to install them for anything else than toying around. Python
 > is not emacs or Firefox, you don't use it in a vacuum
 > and therefore installing non-stable versions is dangerous.

Exactly my point, except that the PEP authors seem to think that we
can cut back on the number of alpha and beta prereleases and still
achieve the stability that such users expect from a Python release.  I
don't think that's right.  I expect that unless quite substantial
resources (far more than "proportional to 1/frequency") are devoted to
each non-LTS release, a large fraction of such users to avoid non-LTS
releases the way they avoid betas now.