On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 11:30, Neil Schemenauer <n...@arctrix.com> wrote:
> Benjamin Peterson <benja...@python.org> wrote: > > On behalf of the Python development team, I'm gleeful to announce > > the second alpha release of Python 2.7. > > Thanks to everyone who contributed. > > > Python 2.7 is scheduled to be the last major version in the 2.x > > series. > > Has this really been decided already? Maybe I missed it. More or less. It was first discussed at the language summit last year and has come up here a couple of times. If needed we can make it official in terms of lifetime of 2.7, etc. at the language summit this year. > In my > opinion, it does Python's reputation harm to make such a statement. > Conservative users (probably the vast majority of Python users) > don't like to hear that software they are considering using is > nearing the end of its life. What does it gain us to announce that > the 2.x branch is dead aside from bugfixes? > > I propose that the 2.x branch be treated like 2.x.y branches: as > long as there is sufficient volunteer labour, it should continue to > live. In order to avoid wasted development effort, it would be > prudent to announce that unless a 2.8 release manager steps up, > whatever is committed to the 2.x branch after the 2.7 release may > never get released. > > Said another way, it's okay for the Python developers to decide to > abandon 2.x and put their efforts into 3.x. It's not okay for them > to prevent others from continuing to work on 2.x or to somehow make > 2.x look worse so 3.x looks better. Python 3 needs to stand on its > own terms and I'm confident it can. > I don't think ending the 2.x series at 2.7 makes it look bad compared to 3.2; it's simply the end of a development line like any other software project. I suspect 2.7 will have a protracted bugfix window because so much code runs on 2.x exclusively at the moment. And if core developers want to continue to backport fixes past two years from release they can (or however long we decide to officially support 2.7). No one is saying people still can't work on the code, just that python-dev as an entity is not going to focus its effort on the 2.x series anymore and people should not rely upon us to continue to focus new development efforts in that series. If there are core developers who want to continue to do bugfix releases then that's fine and I am happy to flag patches as needing backports and let other's do the work after the standard two year maintenance cycle, but I know I do not want to be held accountable as a core developer to keep the 2.x going indefinitely. Maintaining four branches is enough of a reason in my book to not keep the 2.x series going. If there really is an outcry on this we can re-visit the issue, but as of right now we need to move forward at some point and 2.7 seems like that good point. -Brett
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