[Python-Dev] Proposed schedule for Python 3.4 (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Wed Oct 3 16:55:17 CEST 2012

On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 5:16 PM, Larry Hastings <larry at hastings.org> wrote:

I don't agree. It's my understanding that the alphas are largely ignored, and having them earlier would hardly make them more relevant.

I would appreciate it you stopped promoting this myth. Each step in the release process widens the pool of people providing feedback. Some are providing feedback (and patches!) right the way through by building their own copy of Python from source, a few start poking around with the first alpha, more wait for feature freeze, we get a whole slew of people that wait until the release candidates come out, and then we get even more that don't check for backwards incompatible changes until after the final release (so they have to wait until the x.y.1 release before they can upgrade).

Yes, the pool is substantially smaller in the early phases, but phrases like "largely ignored" do a grave disservice to our alpha testers that provide early feedback when we have plenty of time to fix problems, rather than leaving their checks to the last minute and forcing us to choose between delaying the release and shipping with known defects.

I'm not saying "no"--but I'd definitely want to see more people than just you clamoring for the early alphas before I agree to anything.

Python 3.4 will almost certainly include significant changes to main module and sys.path initialisation as well as the way import failures are reported at the command line (and perhaps in the interactive interpreter), along with some adjustments to the Unicode handling feature set and the disassembly support. I can't effectively trial those changes on PyPI (except perhaps some of the disassembly changes), and I don't have the resources to create and distribute Windows and Mac OS X installers on my own. That means, before the release of 3.4a1, any feedback on most of these changes will be limited to those developers with the wherewithal to build Python from source.

Regardless of when the first alpha happens, I'll be promoting the hell out of it, begging for feedback on any of these changes that are available by then (which should be quite a few, given the preceding PyCon US sprints). However, I would like to have months rather than weeks to act on any feedback we do receive. I'm not asking the release team to do any more work - I'm just asking for a chunk of it to be brought forward a few months. If I was asking for an extra release, I could understand resistance to the idea, but what's the concrete benefit of delaying the first alpha release by 4 months from when I'm hoping to see it happen?

Regards, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia

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