[Python-Dev] Counting collisions for the win (original) (raw)

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Fri Jan 20 23:11:15 CET 2012

On 1/20/2012 2:51 PM, Donald Stufft wrote:

I think the counting collision is at best a bandaid and not a proper fix stemmed from a desire to not break existing applications on a bugfix release ...

My opinion of counting is better than yours, but even conceding the theoretical, purity argument, our release process is practical as well. There have been a few occasions when fixes to bugs in our code have been delayed from a bugfix release to the next feature release -- because the fix would break too much code depending on the bug.

Some years ago there was a proposal that we should deliberately tweak hash() to break 'buggy' code that depended on it not changing. This never happened. So it has been left de facto constant, to the extent it is, for some years.

-- Terry Jan Reedy

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