Bugfix releases (RE: profiler results for __getattr__, am I reading this correctly ? )

[Richard Jones]

On Friday 19 October 2001 13:15, Andrew Dalke wrote:
> Richard Jones:
> >Actually, my biggest reason for not going to 2.2 is that it introduces a
> >bunch of new stepwise changes to the code. New code == new bugs as far as
>
> I'm
>
> >concerned. This is not the way to go if your prime intention is to aim for
> >less bugs.
>
> It's a worthy concern.
>
> On the other hand, we've been upgrading from Python 1.5.2 to
> Python 2.1.  We only came across a handful of problems, and our
> regression tests caught them all.
>
> They were things like
>
>    data.append(x, y)   instead of    data.append( (x, y) )
>
> Even ugly code like
>
>    def f(x):
>        from somewhere import *
>
> will work in 2.2.  Why?  Because when the static scoping changes
> went in, enough people (like me :) complained about backwards
> compatibility issues so there's support for this.

I'm not worried abou backward compatibility - that's always been a top 
priority for the python developers. My concern is that in _any_ software - 
when you add new chunks of code, there's a very good chance that those chunks 
have bugs. Python 2.2 will have considerable new chunks of code.


     Richard