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

Brett Cannon brett at python.org
Fri May 7 20:38:07 CEST 2010

On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 09:09, A.M. Kuchling <amk at amk.ca> wrote:

On Fri, May 07, 2010 at 07:52:49PM +1000, Nick Coghlan wrote: > 3.x). I'll take a stab at a more accurate rationale:

Thanks! I've applied the scalpel and reduced it to: * A policy decision was made to silence warnings only of interest to developers by default. :exc:DeprecationWarning and its descendants are now ignored unless otherwise requested, preventing users from seeing warnings triggered by an application. (Carried out in :issue:7319.) In previous releases, :exc:DeprecationWarning messages were enabled by default, providing Python developers with a clear indication of where their code may break in a future major version of Python. However, there are increasingly many users of Python-based applications who are not directly involved in the development of those applications. :exc:DeprecationWarning messages are irrelevant to such users, making them worry about an application that's actually working correctly and burdening the developers of these applications with responding to these concerns. 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. That sounds good to me.

Benjamin suggested being very definite about a 5-year maintenance period, but I don't want to write any checks our butt can't cash, so I've left the text as "Maintenance releases for Python 2.7 will probably be made for 5 years." An alternative formulation might say it will be maintained for the next two 3.x releases, not the next one as usual.

I thought about Ben Finney's suggestion to not give a timespan and describe the conditions for 2.x maintenance continuing, but those conditions are complicated to describe -- if 3.x doesn't catch on? if the 3.x transition is slow? if there's a significant 2.x user base that remains? if someone starts a 2.x maintenance team? -- and might be a confusing tangle of what-if statements.

Why can't we simply say that "we plan to support Python 2.7 beyond the typical two years for bugfix releases"? It doesn't tie us to anything but still lets people know our intentions. We don't have to worry about every possible scenario now (e.g. 3.x gets no more traction or some other rare event) and saying we plan on long term support but don't know for how long is completely truthful; we have no timeline on how long we are willing to keep 2.7 afloat beyond the fact that we plan to do it longer than normal. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20100507/a267a833/attachment-0001.html>

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