Python 1.6 alpha 1 released

[Bjorn Pettersen]

Fredrik Lundh wrote:

> Aahz Maruch wrote:
> > I'm sympathetic.  We only upgraded our production system from 1.5.1 to
> > 1.5.2 last week, because we'd made a number of 1.5.1-specific hacks and
> > had to back them out correctly for 1.5.2.
>
> we upgraded a customer site from 1.3 to 1.5.2 in november
> (distributed, mission critical, many gigabytes per day, custom
> interpreters, lots of C and C++ extensions, etc).
>
> catching up with changes in Python and its standard libraries
> was a very small part of the total effort.  getting it all to work
> on a new version of the operating system was much harder...

Very good points -- to upgrade a system there is a certain amount of
planning, and you have to carefully implement the result of your planning to
minimize any unavoidable downtime.  For some organizations this might not be
required, but I can't think of a comercial one where it isn't.  This takes
real time and costs real money, and sooner or later someone will have to do a
cost/benefit analysis of whether the cost of upgrading to Python 1.6 is worth
the benefits.  In my situation the cost would currently outweigh the
benefits, so I will hold off on transitioning until that changes.  For anyone
working in a software company, this should hardly be surprising (?)

-b