[Pythonmac-SIG] The versioning question...

[Chris Barker]

Eric Nieuwland wrote:

> Would it be an idea to submit a PEP for extending the 'import' keyword?

As I mentioned, my read on this is that it's not going to happen at the 
python level, at least not for a while. This is based on various threads 
in c.l.p, and maybe python-dev. So, while I still think it's important, 
I'm not going to try to work for it now.

Even with wxPython, there was some resistance to the versioning idea, 
which as far as I could tell boiled down to:

"It would be much better to keep packages backward compatible"

Which is also kind of what Bob I. said about PyObjC.

However, while backward compatibility is great, you are going to want to 
break it some time. In the wxPython case, there was a lot that changed 
between 2.4.2 and 2.5.1 and 2.5.2, etc. This was an extreme case, but 
while maybe it would be a good idea to keep backward compatibility from 
2.4.* to 2.5*, at some point, maybe version 3.0, you'll want to break 
it, and then it would be good to have a system in place.

I just seems obvious to me that you should be able to upgrade a 
component on your system, whether it be a library, or a python module, 
without breaking anything that depends on the older component. That's 
why we have version numbers on dynamic libs. Whether it was Apple's 
fault or not, it's still been a pain that I can't just upgrade python on 
my OS-X box. What If Apple some day included PyObjC version X.y and uses 
it for some system components. Wouldn't you like to be able to upgrade 
to PyObjC version W.z on your own schedule, not Apple's?



-Chris







-- 
Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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