PEP 238 (revised)

[Terry Reedy]

"Chris Barker" <chrishbarker at home.net> wrote in message
news:3B60B448.78DBC7D0 at home.net...

> I think this has been dismissed a little too quickly. I suppose I
can't
> comment on what "way too much work" is, as I really don't know how
much
> work it will be, and I'm unlikely to be doing any of it. I do think
that
> it is a lot of work for system administrators to keep all the old
> interpreters around (particularly on new systems, it could be a fair
bit
> of work to get a working copy of Python 2.1 on RedHat 13.2 a few
years
> from now!)

Now that Pythonlabs has control of the distributions, it can keep
source tarballs and windows installers available indefinitely.
Perhaps a process of collecting (and keeping) miscellaneous
installation experience for a given distribution could be instituted.

Examples: install @ pythonlabs.com; or autocollection of postings with
subject like
Install: Python2.2, Linux, Mandrake

> I'm also not so sure about the emulate "exactly" issue. New features
> that have been added but don't break old code

As Tim Peters and someone else convincingly explained in the last few
days, *any* change that changes external behaviour can break some
code.  We just normally do not count it as such when the code broken
depended on a bug or on undefined behavior (unless it is our own
tested and distributed code!).

Terry J. Reedy