[stdlib-sig] Backwards compat (was: Evolving the Standard Library)

[C. Titus Brown]

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 09:28:35AM -0400, Jesse Noller wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 9:18 AM, Michael Foord <michael at voidspace.org.uk> wrote:
> >
> > It looks like it will be something covered at the language summit, but an
> > open space is a good idea. Backwards compatibility is a *big* problem for
> > any major refactoring though.
> >
> > Michael
> >
> 
> Yup, language summit. I'm hoping to cover some amount of this in a
> pending talk proposal I have in the pycon system too.

One interesting thought for backwards compatibility -- why not take all
of the PyPI packages and try importing and/or testing them across
versions, and then trying to build automatic classifiers to highlight
the "interesting" breakages?  A first pass filter would be "breakages we
know about" vs "breakages we don't."

Then you could build these breakages into a compatibility diagnostics
package.

Sounds like a fun PyCon sprint to me...

--titus
-- 
C. Titus Brown, ctb at msu.edu