Eliminating upgrade risk

[Aahz Maruch]

In article <3B656CBC.4F8FAFB2 at interet.com>,
James C. Ahlstrom <jim at interet.com> wrote:
>
>But it would be naive to ignore the problem that Red Hat has
>declined to upgrade from 1.5.2.  A quick
>find | wc shows that Red Hat 7.1 has 84,494 lines of Python
>code not counting the Python libraries.  I don't know how
>Red Hat is supposed to upgrade Python and still know their
>code works.

That's a different issue.  Until June 2001, no version of Python after
1.5.2 was GPL-compatible according to the FSF.  Now that 2.0.1 and 2.1.1
are available, I expect that the various distributions will be
upgrading.  Eric Raymond will make sure of that.  ;-)

>BTW, it's not just the division proposal.  The change from
>lst.append(x, y) to lst.append((x, y)) is another example.

>From what I see, the complaints about the division proposal are
two-fold: silent breakage of old code and difficulty of maintaining
cross-version code.  Neither of those points applies to the
list.append() case, so few people have complained about that.
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