[Python-Dev] PEP 407: New release cycle and introducing long-term support versions

[Paul Moore]

On 18 January 2012 04:32, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
>> It's really about making feature releases more frequent,
>
>> not making previews available during development.
>
> Given the difficulty of making a complete windows build, it would be nice to
> have one made available every 6 months, regardless of how it is labeled.
>
> I believe that some people will see and use good-for-6-months releases as
> previews of the new features that will be in the 'real', normal, bug-fix
> supported, long-term releases.

I'd love to see 6-monthly releases, including Windows binaries, and
binary builds of all packages that needed a compiler to build. Oh, and
a pony every LTS release :-)

Seriously, this proposal doesn't really acknowledge the amount of work
by other people that would be needed for a 6-month release to be
*usable* in normal cases (by Windows users, at least). It's usually
some months after a release on the current schedule that Windows
binaries have appeared for everything I use regularly.

I could easily imagine 3rd-party developers tending to only focus on
LTS releases, making the release cycle effectively *slower* for me,
rather than faster.

Paul

PS Things that might help improve this: (1) PY_LIMITED_API, and (2)
support in packaging for binary releases, including a way to force
installation of a binary release on the "wrong" version (so that
developers don't have to repackage and publish identical binaries
every 6 months).