[Python-Dev] What's New text on future maintenance (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Fri May 7 04:09:46 CEST 2010

On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 6:50 PM, A.M. Kuchling <amk at amk.ca> wrote:

FYI: I've just added the text below to the "What's New" document for 2.7.  I wanted to describe how 2.7 will probably be maintained, but didn't want to write anything that sounded like an iron-clad guarantee of a maintenance timespan.  Does this text seem like a reasonable set of statements?

--amk Python 2.7 is intended to be the last major release in the 2.x series. Though more major releases have not been absolutely ruled out, the

I would scrap the "Though more ... ruled out" part. That just stokes unrealistic hopes. :-)

Python maintainers are planning to focus their efforts on Python 3.x.

This means that 2.7 will remain in place for a long time, running production systems that have not been ported to Python 3.x. Two consequences of the long-term significance of 2.7 are: * It's very likely the 2.7 release will have a longer period of  maintenance compared to earlier 2.x versions.  Python 2.7 will  continue to be maintained while the transition to 3.x is in  progress, and that transition will itself be lengthy.  Most 2.x  versions are maintained for about 4 years, from the first to the  last bugfix release; patchlevel releases for Python 2.7 will  probably be made for at least 6 years. * Because 2.7 will be running production applications, a policy  decision was made to silence warnings only of interest to developers  by default.  Silencing :exc:DeprecationWarning and its descendants  prevents users from seeing warnings triggered by an application.  (Carried out in :issue:7319.)  You can re-enable display of :exc:DeprecationWarning messages by  running Python with the :option:-Wdefault (short form:  :option:-Wd) switch, or you can add  warnings.simplefilter('default') to your code.

All this sounds fine to me. Thanks for taking the time to write this!

-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

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