[Python-Dev] Python 4: don't remove anything, don't break backward compatibility (original) (raw)

Eric V. Smith eric at trueblade.com
Mon Mar 10 19:25:29 CET 2014

On 03/10/2014 02:21 PM, MRAB wrote:

On 2014-03-10 17:08, R. David Murray wrote:

On Mon, 10 Mar 2014 16:06:22 -0000, Brett Cannon <bcannon at gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon Mar 10 2014 at 11:50:54 AM, Victor Stinner <victor.stinner at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2014-03-10 16:25 GMT+01:00 Stefan Richthofer <Stefan.Richthofer at gmx.de>: > > I don't see the point in this discussion. > > As far as I know, the major version is INTENDED to > > indicate backward-incompatible changes. > > This is not a strict rule. I would like to follow Linux 3 which didn't > break the API between Linux 2 and Linux 3. > I disagree. I don't think 3->4 will be as drastic as it was for 2->3, but I view Python 4 as a chance to drop all deprecated APIs that we left in for convenience in porting from Python 2 (e.g. the imp module). We can't put a removal date as we can't really declare Python 2 dead for the whole community. But when Python 4 does come out next decade I would like to say that we have moved entirely beyond Python 2 as a team and thus don't turn into Java and support deprecated code forever. We had this discussion a bit ago, and my sense was that we tentatively decided that we were just going to deprecate and remove things as appropriate, irregardless of version number. I used "4.0" in my message about 'U' as a shorthand for "some time after python2 is no longer an issue". Sorry for the confusion. (That said, I do see some merit to doing some extra cleaning at the 4.0 boundary, just for mental convenience.) What does "irregardless" mean?

Read it as "without regard to".

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