Python 1.6 alpha 1 released

[Bjorn Pettersen]

Patrick Phalen wrote:
[bobbage]
> 
> Well, these two posts have scratching my head. What sort of
> environment are you two (Vladimir & Bjorn) working in that makes it
> seem so onerous to fix your sock.connect() syntax (considering that
> you literally have months to prepare for it)?
[more bobbage]

Some of us have jobs that doesn't involve administering servers, and
fixing things when they break, but rather working on getting the next
release of the software we can charge for out the door.  The more time I
spend on fixing compatibility issues in Python scripts, the less time I
spend on "real" work.

As for my environment, I'm working in a heterogenous, and occationally
discrete network, and on a daily basis I'm probably running Python on
more than five major platforms.  I'm also not a system administrator
(nor do I want to be), so even the process of finding all disk based
versions of scripts is non-trivial (not to mention automatically
generated python code, python code for dormant products in source code
control systems etc. etc.)  Switching over without some guarantee that
we wouldn't have major downtime would be irresponsible, and currently
the benefits of 1.6 is not great enough to warrant planning and
implementing such a move.

-b