[Python-Dev] Official version support statement (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Sat May 12 11:32:23 CEST 2007

"Martin v. Löwis" writes:

I'm all in favor of formalizing a policy of when Python releases are produced, and what Python releases, and what kinds of changes they may contain. However, such a policy should be addressed primarily to contributors, as a guidance, not to users, as a promise. So I have problems with both "official" and "support" still.

I see your point, but I don't see how you propose to keep the users from viewing the guidelines to developers as official policy regarding support, albeit hard to interpret.

Also, it may just be me, but I don't see an official statement as a "promise". It's a "clarification". '''This is what we're trying to do, so you can make well-informed plans, and not be surprised when you ask for something and we say "but we never thought about doing that, and don't intend to".'''

The way we make policy statements is through the PEP process.

Creating the statement that way is important. But publishing a PEP is not enough. Non-developer users don't read PEPs.

After thinking about it a bit, I do agree that "maintain" is more appropriate than "support" (this is after my reply to Terry Reedy, where I wrote that support was OK). Support implies education and adaptation to user needs, but even if that is done by the PSF, it's a separate activity from the development and release processes. While maintenance does include response to user bug reports as part of the development/release process.

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