A modest PEP0238 suggestion

[Stephen Horne]

On 24 Jul 2001 12:37:48 +0300, Ville Vainio <vvainio at karhu.tp.spt.fi>
wrote:

>Stephen Horne <steve at lurking.demon.co.uk> writes:
>
>> Nice and easy for the hobbyist - NOT a sane option for professional
>> users who've bet their reputations on Python, and besides.
>
>They could just keep running the old versions where necessary;
>"legacy" applications don't really need new libraries or features from
>the new versions, do they? I think your reputation will be just fine,
>when you say that these apps need some specific version of python
>installed :-).

How would you feel if you found out that installing your new wiz-bang
application suddenly meant your bread-and-butter application broke.
That is what can happen - someone gets a new application from a
different supplier, updates their Python to use it and *BANG* - the
existing app breaks.

If you ever had to deal with a customer blaming you for something that
was due to them getting a DLL change resulting from a different
applications installation, you'll know what this is like. But in that
case, it's usually down to their other application having bad install
logic or due to common system DLLs not maintaining back compatability
- people understand that in the end.

This case is due to "the language and run-time environment *I*
encouraged you to depend on changed its most basic semantics - sorry
about that." - a little different, really.