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

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Tue Sep 9 10:17:15 EDT 2003

[Guido] > Depends on how you fix these. Fixing the code may break more code > than fixing the docs (assuming the mismatch existed for a long time)!

[Steve]

Such as the socket mismatch that was fixed in (IIRC) 1.6, to loud complaints from half the network programming world? This still bites occasionally when old cord has to be brought forward to more recent versions (though, of course, it isn't hard to make the necessary changes).

That was not a micro release. I'm glad we fixed that one then; now it would be a much bigger disaster. (And it was not a matter of adjusting to the docs, but adjusting to the fact that not all socets deal with host/port pairs.)

[...]

Yup. Any potential for code breakage is going to cause somebody somewhere a certain amount of pain. It's these edge cases that cause most of the problems, since overall the version-to-version compatibility picture is actually remarkably good. But people will cheerfully ignore the 99.99% of their code that doesn't break, and bitch about the little bits that do :-)

For people with a large code base and real customers, the only working approach is long, careful testing with each new Python release. Hence the call for Python-in-a-tie. (Though I haven't heard much about that recently -- I've even heard a call to upgrade the tie to 2.3.)

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list