[Python-ideas] Moving development out of the standard library

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 10:00 PM, Ian Bicking <ianb at colorstudy.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 2:57 PM, Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Now for older versions of Python, I will provide a backport at PyPI,
>> so people can use
>> it under Python 2.x. This backport will probably be made with the
>> trunk so the 2.x line has the latest
>> code. IOW the latest 2.7 release might be more advanced than the one
>> provided in 3.3 for example,
>> but I don't see this as a problem.
>
> It means that, at least for pip, distutils2 3.3 would be effectively the
> last version.

To make sure it's clear: The latest would be 3.4 here, with its
backport in 2.7 and an older version
in 3.3.

> If there are important bugs we'll have to work around them.
> If there are added features we'll have to ignore them.

Not for the bug fixes because they will likely to be backported in all
versions. (3.3 and 2.7)

Now for new features, if pip uses the latest 2.x and the latest 3.x
versions, you will get them.
I am not sure why you would have to ignore them.  You would probably want to
use the new features when they are released, and still make your code
work with older versions.

This is not a new problem btw: if you want to support several versions
of Python, you have to
work around the differences.

Example: There's a big bug in tarfile in Python 2.4, and I had to
backport part of the 2.5 version for a while
in my 2.4 projects. That's doesn't mean I don't want tarfile to be in
the stdlib.

Tarek