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

[Barry A. Warsaw]

>>>>> "TW" == Thomas Wouters <thomas@xs4all.net> writes:

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

Upgrading sucks.  It always breaks something, and the only way to
avoid that is to never upgrade!  But I can appreciate the sentiment.
I think it was Jakob Neilsen who said, when he was talking about the
rate that users upgrade their browsers, that it takes about 2 years to
get the majority of users to upgrade to a new version.  If Python
adoption follows the same curve, I suspect that we'll still see
significant Python 1.5.2 usage for another 18 months or so. :}

    TW> Nevertheless I do think Debian is going a bit over the wall in
    TW> this case, since they have a very clear distinction between
    TW> stable, testing and unstable trees. They could certainly
    TW> switch python to python2 in the unstable tree, since it'll be
    TW> some time before that tree is going into testing, and more yet
    TW> before it's stable.

I don't keep up on Debian release procedures, but that sounds like the
right approach to me.
    
    TW> It may have something to do with the missing readline support
    TW> in python2, though -- the disabling of modules people might
    TW> depend on falls under backwards compatibility again :)

And now we're back to the licensing issues.  Which suck worse than
anything else.  I'd rather be debating the merits of indentation for
blocking with a devote obfuscated C code hacker than sit in another
room with lawyers debating licenses.

-Barry