[python-committers] Policy for committing to 2.7

[R. David Murray]

On Sat, 22 Jun 2013 15:35:41 -0400, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
> On Jun 22, 2013, at 12:02 PM, Eli Bendersky wrote:
> 
> >I may be missing something, but do we have a policy of what we're supposed
> >to commit to the 2.7 branch at this point? I was under the impression that
> >it's only bug fixes, documentation, and maybe tests. But it seems that
> >there are developers who see it otherwise.
> 
> Strongly agree.  One additional allowed category of changes are build system
> fixes, e.g. so that 2.7 can still be built on newer versions of operating
> systems it already supports.
> 
> >It would be great if we could document this somewhere - the 2.7 branch is
> >not a usual bugfix-mode branch, I realize, and hence maybe there's some
> >special treatment it deserves.
> 
> IMO, Benjamin being the 2.7 RM has ultimate[1] say in the matter.  I'm very
> glad he's conservative in what he allows in the branch.

My understanding is that there is an additional category that we allow
beyond what Barry mentioned:  things that add support for "stuff" that
is analogous to the build enhancements:  platform changes we really want
to support that are trivial to add.  The non-controversial example of
this is adding mime types.  The somewhat more controversial (but we've
done it, IIRC) is adding support for new browsers (ie: Chrome) to the
webbrowser module.

But IMO we should be considering the 2.7 branch to be starting to harden
into immobility at this point.  The bar for even bug fixes to be applied
to 2.7 should be higher than for 3.3, and should continue to get higher
still as time passes.

--David