[Python-Dev] Re: Stability and change (original) (raw)

Tim Peters tim_one@email.msn.com
Wed, 10 Apr 2002 02:08:58 -0400

[Skip Montanaro]

... The only way a significant change in the development model is going to work is if the effort necessary to generate micro releases drops drastically.

I'm still vague on what frequent microreleases are thought to buy us, but I'll skip that here.

If churning out a binary installer suitable for a development branch can be reduced to a few minutes, fine. If not, then I suspect either someone else will have to take that task over from Tim or Windows installers won't get cut for development point releases.

Building a Windows installer goes fast. It's usually only the testing that takes time. It's a GUI, not a makefile, and has lots of buttons and options, sets up lots of stuff specific to Windows, stuff that needs to be done differently under the covers across different flavors of Windows, and it needs to be tested across different flavors of Windows under user accounts with different privilege levels, and on and on. Windows is a friggin' mess this way. The other thing that bites is that because I do so much testing, I'm the one who finds the last-second bugs (not mentioning pydoc by name ). When that happens, the whole world grinds to a halt in emergency mode until it's fixed.

I don't know whether the SF file page is still intact, but if it is you can see that we get most prerelease downloads from the Windows builds, whether it's the first alpha or the final release candidate. OK, the page is still partly useful: we got 1700+ downloads of the Windows 2.2.1c2, and about a third of that for the Unix tarball. It's hard to know exactly what to make of that, though, as Windows users seem to download anything with an .exe extension without knowing why <0.5 wink -- but thousands of people routinely downloaded the Windows debug-build zip file when I used to ship that too, and I've counted the number of complaints since I stopped shipping it on one hand>.

If we want to release an untested installer, it will go much faster. It's not in my nature to do so, but I can be paid to be unprofessional .