[Python-Dev] Proposed schedule for Python 3.4

[Nick Coghlan]

On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 5:16 PM, Larry Hastings <larry at hastings.org> wrote:
> I don't agree.  It's my understanding that the alphas are largely ignored,
> and having them earlier would hardly make them more relevant.

I would appreciate it you stopped promoting this myth. Each step in
the release process widens the pool of people providing feedback. Some
are providing feedback (and patches!) right the way through by
building their own copy of Python from source, a few start poking
around with the first alpha, more wait for feature freeze, we get a
whole slew of people that wait until the release candidates come out,
and then we get even more that don't check for backwards incompatible
changes until after the final release (so they have to wait until the
x.y.1 release before they can upgrade).

Yes, the pool is substantially smaller in the early phases, but
phrases like "largely ignored" do a grave disservice to our alpha
testers that provide early feedback when we have plenty of time to fix
problems, rather than leaving their checks to the last minute and
forcing us to choose between delaying the release and shipping with
known defects.

>  I'm not
> saying "no"--but I'd definitely want to see more people than just you
> clamoring for the early alphas before I agree to anything.

Python 3.4 will almost certainly include significant changes to main
module and sys.path initialisation as well as the way import failures
are reported at the command line (and perhaps in the interactive
interpreter), along with some adjustments to the Unicode handling
feature set and the disassembly support. I *can't* effectively trial
those changes on PyPI (except perhaps some of the disassembly
changes), and I don't have the resources to create and distribute
Windows and Mac OS X installers on my own. That means, before the
release of 3.4a1, any feedback on most of these changes will be
limited to those developers with the wherewithal to build Python from
source.

Regardless of when the first alpha happens, I'll be promoting the hell
out of it, begging for feedback on any of these changes that are
available by then (which should be quite a few, given the preceding
PyCon US sprints). However, I would *like* to have months rather than
weeks to act on any feedback we do receive. I'm not asking the release
team to do any more work - I'm just asking for a chunk of it to be
brought forward a few months. If I was asking for an *extra* release,
I could understand resistance to the idea, but what's the concrete
benefit of *delaying* the first alpha release by 4 months from when
I'm hoping to see it happen?

Regards,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia