[Python-Dev] Patch level versions and new features (Was: Some dull gc stats)

[Martin v. Loewis]

"M.-A. Lemburg" <mal@lemburg.com> writes:

> Patch level releases should *never* include new features (unless
> these are essential to fix a serious bug or a simple byproduct
> of a fix). I don't know where you got the impression that Python
> should move back to the 1.5 branch development process where patch
> levels added new features.

>From discussions on python-dev...

> Patch levels are there to stabilize a release, not make it
> more powerful.

What precisely does that mean?

Specific case in question: xml.dom.minidom.toxml does not support the
specification of an encoding of the resulting XML document. Instead,
if there are non-ASCII characters in the output document, it returns a
Unicode object that starts with u"<?xml version='1.0' ?>". People
cannot write this to a file as-is, and they cannot encode it in
anything but UTF-8 (because the document would then be incorrect).

So I added an optional encoding= argument to .toxml, for 2.3. The
question now is: should that argument also be made available for
2.2.2?

Regards,
Martin