[Python-Dev] RELEASED Python 3.0 final

[Guido van Rossum]

I hear some folks are considering advertising 3.0 as experimental or
not ready for serious use yet.

I think that's too negative -- we should encourage people to use it,
period. They'll have to decide for themselves whether they can live
with the lack of ported 3rd party libraries -- which may resolve
itself soon enough. We should make it clear that it's perfectly fine
to stick with 2.6, but at the same time encourage people to try 3.0
and see for themselves -- IMO it's as solid as 2.6. (2.6.1 being more
solid, of course, as will be 3.0.1).

Especially from the education front I've heard a lot of positive
noises about 3.0. See e.g. an early review, posted 8 months ago:
http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/nde/papers/teachpy3.html.

I also want to remind folks that I've promised left and right that
post-3.0 we'll stick to the same backwards compatibility strategy that
we used for the 2.x series. No new incompatibilities. No new features
in 3.0.1 etc.; those go in 3.1, 3.2, etc.

The only compromise I'd be willing to make is that 3.1 can be rather
sooner than the typical 18-24 months cycle. But any API that exists in
3.0 will have to take the regular deprecation route, and if we start
having releases close together we should be careful to measure the
deprecation time in years, not releases.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)