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

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 4:43 PM, C. Titus Brown <ctb at msu.edu> wrote:
> 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...

I don't know if you remember my message on the snakebite mailing list
some times ago on a related topic.

That's the same process I would like to do to test distutils over
PyPI, by grabbing
packages there and running some commands using their setup.py.
and say "this package is Distutils certified !"

But this requires some work to make sure there are no security
problems I/O-wise, unless you work with a list of trusted packages (which is
not what we would want if we want to do QA tests)

And the environment has to be reseted after each run to make sure
there are no problems created by the package.

Quite a work, but I am in for some brainstroming at Pycon on this topic
if you are interested :)