[Python-Dev] Proposed schedule for Python 3.4

[R. David Murray]

On Wed, 03 Oct 2012 20:25:17 +0530, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 5:16 PM, Larry Hastings <larry at hastings.org> wrote:
> > I don't agree.  It's my understanding that the alphas are largely ignored,
> > and having them earlier would hardly make them more relevant.
> 
> I would appreciate it you stopped promoting this myth. Each step in
> the release process widens the pool of people providing feedback. Some
> are providing feedback (and patches!) right the way through by
> building their own copy of Python from source, a few start poking
> around with the first alpha, more wait for feature freeze, we get a
> whole slew of people that wait until the release candidates come out,
> and then we get even more that don't check for backwards incompatible
> changes until after the final release (so they have to wait until the
> x.y.1 release before they can upgrade).
> 
> Yes, the pool is substantially smaller in the early phases, but
> phrases like "largely ignored" do a grave disservice to our alpha
> testers that provide early feedback when we have plenty of time to fix
> problems, rather than leaving their checks to the last minute and
> forcing us to choose between delaying the release and shipping with
> known defects.

I don't have any data to back this up, but it is my impression that more
distributions are providing access to alpha releases in their "testing"
package trees.  As Python continues to grow in importance[1], the number
of people interacting with Python on the distribution development teams[2]
increases, and therefor the number of people likely to run alphas for
testing increases.  So even if Larry were right *now*, he isn't right
for the future, and we should do all we can to nurture an increasing
culture of alpha-testing.

--David

[1] in case anyone hasn't noticed, we *are* a growing community, regardless
    of where various analytics put us relative to other languages :) 

[2] I include things like macports in this category, though I have
    no experience myself with their culture