myths about python 3

[Terry Reedy]

On 1/28/2010 2:51 PM, Steve Holden wrote:
> Carl Banks wrote:

>> Regardless of how magnaminous the people of PSF are, the unfortunate
>> reality is that trademark owners are forced by the law to be
>> "particularly petty".  PSF's IP lawyer will advise not to allow
>> unsanctioned fork of Python 2.7 to call itself Python 2.8.
>>
> But if it were sanctioned ... ? We *are* pretty magnanimous ;-)

I think it foolish to speculate in the absence of specifics. If some 
people wanted to coninue bug-fix maintainance of 2.7 after the main 
group of developers is done with it, in 5 years, then no new name is 
needed. If some people wanted to backport additional 3.x features, while 
still keeping the old, obsolete stuff around, then '2.8' would be 
appropriate. If some people wanted to add a collection of incompatible 
new features, perhaps some that Guido has rejected for 'Python', so that 
they were producing a real fork, then a new name should be used.

I consider the first option possible, assuming that significant bugs 
still remain in 5 years. The second seems more dubious, as the 
developers have already backported most of what they thought sensible. 
The third has always been possible, and has been done, and there would 
be nothing really special about using 2.7 as a base.

Terry Jan Reedy