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

Paul Prescod paul@prescod.net
Wed, 10 Apr 2002 09:11:22 -0700

Guido van Rossum wrote:

... I didn't say that. NumPy has exactly the same issues.

We've lost the thread of discussion and are now in the land of wasted breath, but just in case you are curious how we got here...

Fred said: "Keeping PyXML compatible with old versions of Python is a pain."

Then he said: "It's enough to make me think that Andrew was right about including XML in Python."

To me, that's a non sequiter. PyXML has the same backwards compatibility headache as any other third party module. If I had a module called PyGraphs that needed weak references, I would have a problem if I wanted it to work on Python 2.0 or 1.5.2.

Then you said: "Yeah, we only included XML because some people were very vocal about including it for political reasons." Of course I was one of those people so I still wanted to get to the bottom of this non sequiter.

PyXML would have exactly the same backwards compatibility headaches if there were no XML support in Python whatsoever. It's just a problem that third party modules have. You either endure the pain or you make your users upgrade to a new version of Python. As far as I can tell, those are the only two choices.

Paul Prescod