[Python-ideas] Proposal to change Python version release cycle

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Nov 5, 2017 at 2:29 AM, Wolfgang <tds333 at mailbox.org> wrote:
> A good point but two digits minor version numbers have the possibility
> to break a lot code. There is a lot of stuff out where a single digit
> major version is assumed. Even the official Python build for windows
> with python27.dll, python36.dll can be problematic because the dot
> is omitted between numbers.
> Other do the same for compilation they concatenate only majorminor for a
> name.
> Then version 3.10 is the same as 31.0.
> Ok I know this will take a while.

Python 1.0 was released in 1994. Then 2.0 came out in 2000 (six
years), and 3.0 in 2008 (eight years). So far, we've been nine years
into 3.0 and aren't looking at 4.0 yet, so it's going to be at least
ten. If version 5.0 is another twelve years after that, and version
6.0 is fourteen later, we'll be looking for version 31.0 some time
around the year 3000. I think we can let a future generation worry
about pathing problems with DLL names.

Seriously, I don't think there's any need to stress about version 31
of something as stable as Python. No matter how long it *actually* is
between versions, it's going to be a lot longer than we can really
plan for right now. In that much time, *anything* could change.

ChrisA