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On Jan 29, 2009, at 8:34 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
I think that the important question is "can the 3.0.x series be made
'viable' in less than the time frame for 3.1?" If not, I really have
to think it's DOA from the point of view of folks who consider 3.0.0
non-viable. I think that's what Barry and Martin are saying.
Of course, the definition of "viable" is the key thing here. I'm not
picking on Raymond, but what is not viable for him will be perfectly
viable for other people. We have to be very careful not to view our
little group of insiders as the sole universe of Python users (3.0 or
otherwise).
Guido is saying something different. AIUI, he's saying that
explicitly
introducing controlled instability into 3.0.x of the form "this is
what the extremely stable non-buggy inherited-from-3.0 core of 3.1 is
going to look like" will be a great service to those who consider
3.0.0 non-viable.
The key point is that new features in 3.1 are generally going to be
considered less reliable than those inherited from 3.0, and thus a
debugged 3.0, even if the implementations have been unstable, provides
a way for the very demanding to determine what that set is, and to
test how it behaves in their applications.
I'm not sure I agree with that last paragraph. We have a pretty good
track record of introducing stable new features in dot-x releases, so
there's no reason to believe that the same won't work for 3.x.
I think it's worth a try, after consultation with some of the major
developers who are the ostensible beneficiaries. But if tried, I
think it's important to mark 3.0.x as "not yet stable" even if the
instability is carefully defined and controlled.
It all depends on where that instability lies. If 3.0 crashed every
time you raised an exception due to some core design flaw, then yeah,
we'd have a problem. The fact that a bundled module doesn't do what
you want it to does not scream instability to me. The should-have-
been-removed features don't either.
Barry
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