[Python-Dev] PEP 407: New release cycle and introducing long-term support versions (original) (raw)

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Wed Jan 18 08:44:30 CET 2012

On 18 January 2012 04:32, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:

It's really about making feature releases more frequent,

not making previews available during development. Given the difficulty of making a complete windows build, it would be nice to have one made available every 6 months, regardless of how it is labeled. I believe that some people will see and use good-for-6-months releases as previews of the new features that will be in the 'real', normal, bug-fix supported, long-term releases.

I'd love to see 6-monthly releases, including Windows binaries, and binary builds of all packages that needed a compiler to build. Oh, and a pony every LTS release :-)

Seriously, this proposal doesn't really acknowledge the amount of work by other people that would be needed for a 6-month release to be usable in normal cases (by Windows users, at least). It's usually some months after a release on the current schedule that Windows binaries have appeared for everything I use regularly.

I could easily imagine 3rd-party developers tending to only focus on LTS releases, making the release cycle effectively slower for me, rather than faster.

Paul

PS Things that might help improve this: (1) PY_LIMITED_API, and (2) support in packaging for binary releases, including a way to force installation of a binary release on the "wrong" version (so that developers don't have to repackage and publish identical binaries every 6 months).

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