[Python-Dev] [RELEASED] Python 2.7 alpha 2 (original) (raw)

Barry Warsaw barry at python.org
Mon Jan 11 13:37:46 CET 2010

On Jan 10, 2010, at 6:07 PM, Martin v. Löwis wrote:

As for decisions: I don't think there was an official BDFL pronouncent, but I recall Guido posting a message close to that, proposing that 2.7 will be a release that will see bug fix releases for an indefinite period of time (where indefinite != infinite). This was shortly after him proposing that perhaps we shouldn't make a 2.7 release at all, and stop at 2.6.

IMO, the focus for Python 2.7 (and beyond) must be on helping people transition to Python 3. That should be the reason why a 2.7 is released and, what should dictate whether a 2.8 is necessary.

Maybe everything people need (except manpower and round tuits) is already there. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Distribute supports automatically running 2to3 at install time for Python packages. This allowed me to "port" a recent (admittedly small) package to Python 3 by making it "python2.6 -3" clean and adding a couple of attributes to my setup.py[1]. I don't know how widely that feature's known, but I think it's huge, and exactly what we need to be doing. The more we can make it easy for people to port their Python 2 code to Python 3, and to support that with one code base, the quicker we'll get to a predominantly Python 3 world.

So the question we should be asking is: what's missing from Python 2.7 to help with this transition? If we can't get it into 2.7, then why, and would pushing it back to 2.8 help at all?

-Barry

[1] modulo a bug in Distribute that caused doctest in separate files to not be used when running under Python 3.

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