[Python-Dev] PEP 407 / splitting the stdlib (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Thu Jan 19 13:00:06 CET 2012

On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 9:17 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

If I were a casual user of a piece of software, I'd really find such a numbering scheme complicated and intimidating. I don't think most users want such a level of information.

I think the ideal numbering scheme from a new user point of view is the one Brett suggested (where major=language update, minor=stdlib update), but (as has been noted) there are solid historical reasons we can't use that.

While I still have misgivings, I'm starting to come around to the idea of just allowing the minor release number to increment faster (Barry's co-authorship of the PEP, suggesting he doesn't see such a scheme causing any problems for Ubuntu is big factor in that). I'd still like the core language version to be available programmatically, though, and I'd like the PEP to consider displaying it as part of sys.version and using it to allow things like having bytecode compatible versions share bytecode files in the cache.

Cheers, Nick.

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

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