[Mailman-Developers] print >> sys.stderr does not compile

[Thomas Wouters]

On Tue, Feb 20, 2001 at 12:20:27PM -0500, Barry A. Warsaw wrote:

> First, I don't buy the backwards compatibility argument.  Yes, some
> code broke, but it was broken anyway (people using undocumented APIs).
> The broken code is easily fixed.

That is not something you can sell very easily, Barry. From the perspective
of providing a service to a lot of third parties, with at best a varying
cluelevel, upgrading is a very scary thing. I may seem very conservative on
python-dev, wrt. backwards compatibility, but I assure you I'm quite the
radical compared to some people, and compared to myself when considering
upgrades on production platforms :)

For instance, because we run webservers that serve over 10k domains, I am
very cautious in upgrading Apache, PHP or GD-lib on those machines. Yet
every time I do it, after careful consideration, I 'break' some websites
that were conciously or unconciously depending on a bug in some piece of
that software, or linked to a fixed version of a library, or using an
obsolete API. They might have been wrong in doing so, but from their
perspective it's very simple: it worked, *we* changed something, and now it
no longer works.

Nevertheless I do think Debian is going a bit over the wall in this case,
since they have a very clear distinction between stable, testing and
unstable trees. They could certainly switch python to python2 in the
unstable tree, since it'll be some time before that tree is going into
testing, and more yet before it's stable. It may have something to do with
the missing readline support in python2, though -- the disabling of modules
people might depend on falls under backwards compatibility again :)

-- 
Thomas Wouters <thomas@xs4all.net>

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