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

Ben Wolfson wolfson at gmail.com
Fri Jan 20 23:33:08 CET 2012

On Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 2:11 PM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:

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.

AFAICT Brett's suggestion (which had occurred to me as well, but I'm not a core developer by any stretch) seemed to get lost in the debate: would it be possible to go with collision counting for bugfix releases and hash randomization for new feature releases? (Brett made it here: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2012-January/115740.html>.)

-- Ben Wolfson "Human kind has used its intelligence to vary the flavour of drinks, which may be sweet, aromatic, fermented or spirit-based. ... Family and social life also offer numerous other occasions to consume drinks for pleasure." [Larousse, "Drink" entry]

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