On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 8:09 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solip...@pitrou.net> wrote: > Guido van Rossum <guido <at> python.org> writes: >> >> Was this discussed somewhere? > > I don't remember so, except for a short subthread on python-ideas where you > indeed mentioned (to my disappointment :-)) that you were against a one-year > release period.
Trust me on this too, please. We used to have releases once a year and we got really big serious feedback from our biggest users that the release cycle was going too fast. We discussed it amply and agreed on a minimum time of 18 months between releases. This was quite a while ago (I recall it being somewhere between 2000 and 2004) but I don't see that the situation has really changed -- if anything, we need to slow down more. We should really have a PEP for this, like we do for bugfix releases (PEP 6), but at the time we weren't so anal about PEPs for process. I realize this can be frustrating for developers who want to see their code released. I had the same feeling at the time. But when it was explained to me what a version upgrade looks like for a typical large company who have 100,000 or more lines of Python, often with insufficient tests, written by people who no longer work for the company or expensive consultants, I realized that releasing once a year was a break-neck pace for such users. There was wide discussion and community agreement on the 18 months minimum, as a compromise between the needs of large users (who would have been happier with two years) and the desires of developers (who, like you, preferred shorter release cycles). I really don't think we should change this "contract with our users" now. If necessary, we'll have to write a PEP to describe and explain it. -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido) _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
