[Python-Dev] Bazaar branches available (again) on Launchpad (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Wed Jan 20 13:16:34 CET 2010

David Lyon wrote:

On 2; Who knows what their life cycle is. CVS is pretty much dead, and svn looks like it is on the way out. I can't think of how anything could be better than mercurial or bzr but I know I will be proved wrong.

I believe you misunderstood what Matthieu meant by life cycle there: think "release cycle". If a project pushes out new releases significantly more often than every 18-24 months (as is currently true for all of the major SCM tools), then that fact alone makes it a very bad fit for the Python standard library.

And centralised source control will be going strong for years. The DVCS approach may be great for the open source world, but the gains are far more limited in a closed source shop (especially a group writing internal corporate applications which doesn't need to keep many, if any, maintenance branches going).

If we weren't dealing with 4 active branches, the DVCS discussion would have got a lot less traction with the core developers - aside from better handling of multiple lines of development, most of the benefits of the switch to a DVCS accrue to people without commit access to the SVN repository.

Anyway, we've wandered far afield from legit python-dev topics now. Any further ideas about super_mega_easy_install functionality that can pull code from source control systems and build it rather than requiring prebuild source tarballs should be directed to python-ideas (they probably need to bake more even before they make an appearance on distutils-sig).

Cheers, Nick.

P.S. As Jesse said... your enthusiasm is great, but please don't assume that some inherent conservatism on the part of other developers is automatically evil or the result of a failure to see your point. A lot of people around the world rely on our stuff every day. We owe it to them to be measured in our actions and to put serious thought into any major changes or additions we make to the language and the standard library. For the current stage of its development, Python 3 is in a good place from our point of view - its major carrot has really always been the better Unicode support it offers, and the ever-increasing globalisation of the web will create more and more pressure pushing developers in that direction as the years go by. Sure, Python 3 cleans up assorted other things as well, but the change to the text processing model is the big one that is fundamentally incompatible with the architecture of the 2.x series. Compared to that change, everything else is just tinkering.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia

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