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

[Steve Dower]

My thinking on this issue was that some/most packages from the stdlib would move into site-packages. Certainly I'd expect asyncio to be in this category, and probably typing. Even going as far as email and urllib would potentially be beneficial (to those packages, is my thinking).

Obviously not every single module can do this, but there are plenty that aren't low-level dependencies for other modules that could. Depending on particular versions of these then becomes a case of adding normal package version constraints - we could even bundle version information for non-updateable packages so that installs fail on incompatible Python versions.

The "Uber repository" could be a requirements.txt that pulls down wheels for the selected stable versions of each package so that we still distribute all the same code with the same stability, but users have much more ability to patch their own stdlib after install.

(FWIW, we use a system similar to this at Microsoft for building Visual Studio, so I can vouch that it works on much more complicated software than Python.)

Cheers,
Steve

Top-posted from my Windows Phone

-----Original Message-----
From: "Paul Moore" <p.f.moore at gmail.com>
Sent: ‎7/‎3/‎2016 14:23
To: "Brett Cannon" <brett at python.org>
Cc: "Guido van Rossum" <guido at python.org>; "Nick Coghlan" <ncoghlan at gmail.com>; "Python-Dev" <python-dev at python.org>; "Steve Dower" <steve.dower at python.org>
Subject: Re: [Python-Dev] release cadence (was: Request for CPython 3.5.3 release)

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
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