[Python-Dev] Python version numbers (original) (raw)

Nathaniel Smith njs at pobox.com
Tue Apr 3 09:24:27 EDT 2018

On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 5:51 AM, Paul G <paul at ganssle.io> wrote:

Maybe this has already been discussed ad nauseum, but is the idea here that Python will stay on Python 3.x, but also start breaking backwards compatibility with old versions? That would seem to be a violation of semantic versioning.

Python's versioning has worked this way since well before "semantic versioning" was invented... so I think it's more fair to say semantic versioning is a violation of Python ;-).

CalVer does have the nice properties that it makes a public commitment that there will never be another "x.0"-style release, and that it encodes some useful information into the version (maybe it would be slightly easier to convince people to stop using 2.7 if it was "Python 2010"). But the current scheme is so ingrained in the culture at this point that I doubt there's much appetite for fiddling with it...

-n

-- Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org

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