[Python-Dev] release cadence (was: Request for CPython 3.5.3 release)

[Paul Moore]

On 3 July 2016 at 22:04, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
> This last bit is what I would advocate if we broke the stdlib out unless an
> emergency patch release is warranted for a specific module (e.g. like
> asyncio that started this discussion). Obviously backporting is its own
> thing.

It's also worth noting that pip has no mechanism for installing an
updated stdlib module, as everything goes into site-packages, and the
stdlib takes precedence over site-packages unless you get into
sys.path hacking abominations like setuptools uses (or at least used
to use, I don't know if it still does). So as things stand,
independent patch releases of stdlib modules would need to be manually
copied into place.

Allowing users to override the stdlib opens up a different can of
worms - not necessarily one that we couldn't resolve, but IIRC, it was
always a deliberate policy that overriding the stdlib wasn't possible
(that's why backports have names like unittest2...)

Paul