Python milestone releases

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Thomas D'Tak wrote:
> The question is now, how to handle this kind of problems?

The Python Business Forum once tried to attack the problem
by planning to release a "Python-in-a-tie" release. This
release would be maintained essentially forever, and they
wanted PythonLabs to commit that this release is not
superceded by another release for atleast a year. Python
2.2 was chosen as the basis, and indeed, it lived for 18
months without a successor. Today, 2.2 is not maintained
anymore by the "usual" maintainers, which have moved towards
2.3 and 2.4. Nobody has taken over maintenance of 2.2,
from which I conclude there is really no need for ongoing
maintenance of old releases.

Now, if your partners are still running Python versions
too old for your software, the pressure to upgrade should
come from you, the one who needs the newer version. Python
supports side-by-side installation of multiple versions,
so this should cause no problem (except for the disk space,
of course).

Regards,
Martin