[Python-Dev] Python 2.7 patch levels turning two digit

[Donald Stufft]

On Jun 23, 2014, at 4:31 PM, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:

> On Jun 23, 2014, at 04:20 PM, Donald Stufft wrote:
> 
>> At the risk of getting Guido to post his slide again, I still think the
>> solution to the old compiler is to just roll a 2.8 with minimal changes.
> 
> No.  It's not going to happen, for all the reasons discussed previously.
> Python 2.8 is not a solution to anything.
> 
> If a new, incompatible compiler suite is required, why can't there just be
> multiple Windows downloads on https://www.python.org/download/releases/2.7.7/
> ?  Well, on reason is that you'd have to convince MvL or someone else to take
> over the work that would require, but that's gotta be *much* lighter weight
> than releasing a Python 2.8.

As far as I am aware, a 2.7 with a different compiler, even if it’s just an option
is an attractive nuisance. None of the tooling right now differentiates between
binary compatibility by anything other than “CPython 2.7”.

The end result of having a 2.7 which is built with the old compiler, and a 2.7 built
with the new compiler is that you’ll end up with binary distributions which work
sometimes if you’re lucky and the creator of the binary distribution and you
happened to pick the same “variant” of 2.7. Most likely result is all the binary
distributions will *mostly* still depend on using the old compiler because of the
corpus of existing binary packages that depend on that. Which means that the
2.7 with new compiler will exist entirely to act as a footgun to anyone who picks
it and also wants to use binary packages.

> 
> -Barry
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-----------------
Donald Stufft
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