On 17 Jan 2014 12:03, "Kristján Valur Jónsson" <krist...@ccpgames.com> wrote: > > I never got the impression that this was a matter of funding, Nick. > > And while I completely understand that core developers enjoy working in 3 much more, it was decided to not accept any improvements for a +2.7 version even from those that would do so voluntarily. This could have be done without making any commitment to release a 2.8 at any point.
Doing that on the core infrastructure requires core developer *time* in order to review the patches. We made it crystal clear we weren't interested in providing that for free, and nobody ever even asked about the possibility of *paid* development to create a Python 2.8. > This is why I drew the comparison. There are barriers put in place to try to achieve a social engineering result. The only barrier was the core development team deciding not to proceed with 2.x feature development for free any more after the parallel 2.6 and 2.7 releases. The question of paid development has never been discussed. It's only come up now because we're almost two releases into Python 3 only development and commercial Python 2 users are realising there is stuff there that they want that is technically backwards compatible with Python 2. That means that anyone that wants a Python 2.8 release either needs to fund the development infrastructure for a fork that doesn't involve the existing core development team, or else come to a deal with enough core developers that Guido can be persuaded to approve a "bought & paid for" 2.8 release. However, given the fact that most interesting backwards compatible changes can already be backported via PyPI, it's highly unlikely that anyone will put up that kind of money. Stackless 2.8 is the sole exception because you *already* have the infrastructure and community in place to maintain a CPython 2 fork, so backporting a few additional changes from CPython 3 really doesn't make a big difference to that workload. Cheers, Nick. > > > > K > > > > From: Nick Coghlan [mailto:ncogh...@gmail.com] > Sent: Friday, January 17, 2014 7:51 > To: Kristján Valur Jónsson > Cc: Matthias Klose; python-committers; Martin v. Löwis > > Subject: Re: [python-committers] Updated schedule for Python 3.4 > > > > > On 17 Jan 2014 01:02, "Kristján Valur Jónsson" <krist...@ccpgames.com> wrote: > > > > The hope is that by not adding features to 2.x, people will flock around 3.x en masse :) > > Very few of us think that way - it's that we think Python 3 is a better language in most ways, and it is certainly much easier and more pleasant to work on, which matters a great deal for something many of us are doing as a side project outside work hours. I personally get very annoyed by snide remarks like this suggesting that four years of parallel feature development and eight years of parallel maintenance on a volunteer driven project *aren't enough*. > > Would you have preferred a Gnome or KDE style transition where the parallel development periods were measured in months rather than years? > > Open source projects are innately engineering driven, and thus vastly less tolerant of long term technical debt than commercial enterprises that can offer additional financial incentives to tolerate working with old code for backwards compatibility reasons. That's *why* a company like Red Hat can continue to support Python 2.7 out to 2023+, even though upstream community support will end in 2015 - people don't maintain and support old platforms like RHEL3 for fun, we do it because we get *paid*. > > CCP could have stepped in at any time and proposed funding (or organising funding for) a full Python 2.8 release after it became clear that python-dev wasn't going to do it voluntarily, but they, like every other commercial entity, realised doing so was likely not to be cost effective given the preferences of upstream and the extended life cycle of 2.7. It sounds like they may be changing their mind as 2015 nears and the idea of Stackless 2.8 is considered, but that's exactly the way open source *should* work.
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