[Python-Dev] Shorter release schedule? (original) (raw)

Tennessee Leeuwenburg tleeuwenburg at gmail.com
Wed May 13 06:44:52 CEST 2009

On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 1:26 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de>wrote:

> Just food for thought here, but seeing how 3.1 is going to be a real featureful > schedule despite being released shortly after 3.0, wouldn't it make sense to > tighten future release planning a little?

Do you have any specific releases in mind that you would like to apply such a tightened schedule to? > I was thinking something like doing a > major release every 12 months (rather than 18 to 24 months as has been > heuristically the case lately).

If I can just respond with a bit of feedback from my workplace, I'd say that slower is better. I'm grimacing as I write that :) because I personally love to be able to take advantage of the new capabilities in each release.

Can I ask if there's any sense in pursuing a release schedule which is slow for whatever might be deemed the "most core modules" but faster for "less core modules"?

This is really a response to my workplace environment. The pro of that is that it's a real example, but the con is that it may not be best practise :)

Something else which would definitely be useful for me personally would be a kind of update egg which I could apply to, say, Python 3.0 to bring it up to 3.1 capabilities. Something that already happens now at work reasonably often is that on my PC I have Python 2.4, 2.5, 2.6 and 3.0 installed. I tend to develop under 2.6 from preference. However, server X only has 2.4 installed or worse, 2.3 which I don't even have. Recently I was bitten by this as my code was relying heavily on some functionality in datetime which had changed. I was faced with having to do some re-architecting that I really didn't want to do.

Now, I don't know of course (I found another way around the issue), but suppose the changes to Python I needed were relatively cosmetic, i.e. the kind of thing I could maybe install into a virtualenv wrapper, then it would have been quite easy for me to run my scripts written for Python 2.6.

To get to the point, I wonder if it would be possible to release new versions alongside a patch or egg which someone with only user-level privileges could use on a server to avoid being held back by a slower server update cycle. A more frequent update cycle would then be easier to deal with. More features would get out into use more quickly, while the pressures of the lowest-common-denominator would be eased.

Just some thoughts... Regards, -Tennessee -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20090513/f45853c7/attachment.htm>

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list