[Python-Dev] PEP 407: New release cycle and introducing long-term support versions (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Wed Jan 18 13:48:58 CET 2012

Antoine Pitrou writes:

Since testing is the bottleneck on what users consider to be "available for me", you cannot decrease the amount of testing (alpha, beta releases) by anywhere near the amount you're increasing frequency, or you're just producing "as is" snapshots.

The point is to increase the amount of testing by making features available in stable releases on a more frequent basis. Not decrease it.

We're talking about different kinds of testing. You're talking about (what old-school commercial software houses meant by "beta") testing in a production or production prototype environment. I'd love to see more of that, too! My claim is that I don't expect much uptake if you don't do close to as many of what are called "alpha" and "beta" tests on python-dev as are currently done.

Alphas and betas never produce much feedback, because people are reluctant to install them for anything else than toying around. Python is not emacs or Firefox, you don't use it in a vacuum and therefore installing non-stable versions is dangerous.

Exactly my point, except that the PEP authors seem to think that we can cut back on the number of alpha and beta prereleases and still achieve the stability that such users expect from a Python release. I don't think that's right. I expect that unless quite substantial resources (far more than "proportional to 1/frequency") are devoted to each non-LTS release, a large fraction of such users to avoid non-LTS releases the way they avoid betas now.

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