On Sun, Jun 22, 2014 at 2:57 AM, M.-A. Lemburg <m...@egenix.com> wrote: > On 21.06.2014 12:51, Nick Coghlan wrote: >> Such code has an easy fix available, though, as sys.version_info has >> existed since 2.0, and handles two digit micro releases just fine. The >> docs for sys.version also have this explicit disclaimer: "Do not >> extract version information out of it, rather, use version_info and >> the functions provided by the platform module." > > I don't think that's a good argument. Of course, there are > better ways to figure out the version number, but fact is, > existing code, even in the stdlib, does use and parse > the sys.version string version. > > During Python's lifetime, we've always avoided two digit > version numbers, so people have been relying on this, even > if it was never (AFAIK) documented anywhere.
It's going to be a broken-code-breaking change that's introduced in a point release, but since PEP 404 implicitly says that there won't be a 2.10.0, there's no way around that. Although actually, a glance at the stdlib suggests that 2.10.0 (or 3.10.0) would break a lot more than 2.7.10 would break - there are places where sys.version[:3] is used (or equivalents like "... %.3s ..." % sys.version), or a whole-string comparison is done against a two-part version string (eg: sys.version >= "2.6"), and at least one place that checks sys.version[0] for the major version number, but I didn't find any that look at sys.version[:5] or equivalent. Everything that cares about the three-part version number seems to either look at sys.version.split()[0] or sys.version_info. Do you know where this problematic code is? I checked this in the 2.7.3 stdlib as packaged on my Debian Wheezy system, for what it's worth. ChrisA _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
