[Python-Dev] Re: PEP 328 -- relative and multi-line import (original) (raw)

Aahz aahz at pythoncraft.com
Sun Apr 11 02:14:35 EDT 2004

On Sat, Apr 10, 2004, Bill Janssen wrote:

Andrew Koenig:

I do wish to caution against assuming the problem is trivial. I've been down this road myself, and I think I understand the problem. However, whenever I've made changes of this break-itude, I've always done it in a major release. Changing things this way in a minor release just seems hostile to me. Remember that one of the major reasons people use Python (instead of, say, Scheme) is the availability of lots of packages written in Python to do various things. Making those packages buggy is a suboptimal way to win friends and influence people.

Python's version changes from 2.0 through 2.3 have all been considered "major" releases, as will the upcoming 2.4 release. Ditto 1.4 to 1.5 (haven't been involved with Python long enough to know about earlier releases). For that matter, 1.5 to 1.5.1 to 1.5.2 contained a fair number of major changes, which led to the creation of PEP 6. The jump from 1.5 to 1.6 to 2.0 was overall driven more by politics than technical issues.

Although we talk about plans for Python 3.0, that's very much a pie-in-the-sky release at this point, and that will likely contain about as much breakage as going from FORTRAN II to Fortran 77.

I don't see anyone else considering this a major issue in this case as long as we allot a sufficiently long timeline (and if you search the records, I'm generally one of the people more likely to raise objections about causing old code to fail). If you want to pursue this angle, I think you should go to c.l.py to see if anyone agrees with you.

Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/

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