[Distutils] a plea for backward-compatibility / smooth transitions (was: Re: Migrating Hashes from MD5 to SHA256)

[Donald Stufft]

On Jul 29, 2013, at 5:38 AM, holger krekel <holger at merlinux.eu> wrote:

> There are >1000 times more people using python packaging tools than
> there are ones following the recent distutils-sig/Donald/Nick verdicts
> or tool release notes.  And heck, even for me being quite involved in all
> this stuff, having written a related PEP, it's really hard to see what's
> coming and to prevent breakage for my tools's/projects's users.
> Therefore, to be honest, at this point i am almost afraid of what is
> released/deployed next in PyPI/Installer land.  I'd rather like to 
> get into a "can't wait to get the next release" mode.

I'd also like to point out this. I think you got bitten by one particular backward
incompatibility and are "Once bitten twice shy". I had a number people asking
me near every day how long until pip 1.4 was coming out because they were
excited for the new changes including the improved pre-release handling.

I've personally gotten or seen more complaints over the naming of a variable
in the config file then I have over any changes we've made. The runner up
to that is the fallout from switching to requiring verified SSL.

-----------------
Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/attachments/20130729/11bae58a/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 841 bytes
Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/attachments/20130729/11bae58a/attachment-0001.pgp>