[Python-Dev] New functionality in micro releases (was: Documenting branch policy) (original) (raw)

Fred L. Drake, Jr. fdrake at acm.org
Mon Sep 8 14:27:52 EDT 2003

Just van Rossum writes:

It's been a huge pain with 2.2 vs. 2.2.1 even: all stuff written for 2.2.1 that uses booleans does not work on plain 2.2, which is what's

No code written for 2.2.1 should be using bool(), True, or False; those were not documented in 2.2.1 at all as far as I can tell. The description of bool() was added to the docs in 2.2.3, and I'm not sure why, though it is noted that it was added in 2.2.1. I'd be happy to rip it out of the documentation, or add a stronger compatibility warning, for 2.2.4.

installed on OSX 10.2. Which sortof kills the advantage of having a Python installed with the OS to begin with. In retrospect, I would have been strongly against adding booleans to 2.2.1 for this reason. Apart from real bugs, I think every program that works on 2.x.y should work on 2.x.z, regardless of whether y > z or y < z.

Depending on just what you mean "every program that works", this could completely prevent these bugfix releases. We might not be able to remove a core dump since it would allow code to run that was not run before, thereby changing the behavior of the code.

-Fred

-- Fred L. Drake, Jr. PythonLabs at Zope Corporation

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