[Python-Dev] Maintaining old releases (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Wed Aug 13 07:53:50 CEST 2008

Because there won't typically be sufficient testing and release infrastructure to allow arbitrary bug fixes to be committed on the branch. The buildbots are turned off, and nobody tests the release candidate, no Windows binaries are provided - thus, chances are very high that a bug fix release for some very old branch will be worse than the previous release, rather than better. Second, I don't think this is true. People using those patch level releases will test and report bugs if they are introduced by such backports.

They might be using releases, but they are not using the subversion maintenance branches. Do you know anybody who regularly checks out the 2.4 maintenance branch and tests it?

So at best, people will only report bugs after the release was made, meaning that there is a realistic chance that the release itself breaks things.

As for using the releases themselves: there have been 80462 downloads of 2.4.5 since it was released in March, as compared to 517325 downloads of the 2.5.2 MSI in July alone. So I'm skeptical that many people do actually use the 2.4.5 release.

Besides, developers backporting such changes are diligent enough to test their changes - they will usually have a reason for applying the extra effort to backport.

My problem is that this backporting is not systematic. It's arbitrary whether patches get backported or not. Part of the problem is that it is/was also unclear whether there ever will be another release made out of 2.4. When 2.4.4 was released, Anthony announced, in

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2006-October/069326.html

"This will be the last planned release in the Python 2.4 series"

So anybody committing to the 2.4 branch after that should have expected that the patches will never get released.

Regards, Martin

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list