ConfigParser module in 1.52 is buggy?

[Thomas Wouters]

On Tue, May 29, 2001 at 08:34:21AM -0400, Mike C. Fletcher wrote:

> I seem to recall discussion of maintenance releases at some point in time.

Yes. Probably PEP #6:

http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/pep-0006.html

Which was written, conceived and performed by Ahz, between 2.0 and 2.1. It
lists two patch Czars, Moshe and me, for 2.0.1 and 2.1.1 respectively. It
completely avoids mentioning a 1.5.3 :)

> Given that 1.5.2 is the largest installed base (or, at least, that's my
> impression, I suppose I might be wrong), especially given the number of
> embedded systems where Python is used as a scripting system (and therefore
> updating is not possible for an end-user), I would consider updates to 1.5.2
> to be a more important maintenance target then any of the later versions
> (maintenance as distinct from new development).

1.5.2 is also *horribly out of date*. A lot of the bugs in 1.5.2 are hard to
'fix', and require rewriting of code -- something which is expressly
forbidden for bugfix releases as described in PEP 6. But then, PEP 6
explicitly covers only post-2.0 releases:

    Starting with Python 2.0, all feature releases are required to
    have a version number the form X.Y; patch releases will always be
    of the form X.Y.Z.

The first question anyone interested in building a 1.5.3 should ask
him/herself is: why ? Why do people stick to 1.5.2, avoiding 2 years of
development ? Is it because of flawed features like unicode ? Because of the
lack of obvious performance increases, and in some areas even performance
reductions ? Is it because of the licence issue ?

> As to whether I personally am interested in doing this maintenance release,
> no.  I have things to draw, books to write, buildings to build, that kind of
> stuff, and I will be cutting back to ten hours or so of hobby programming a
> week at the end of this week, I have very little interest in making this the
> bulk of that time (especially since I've already moved to 2.0 myself, this
> really needs someone who has some investment in remaining with 1.5.2).

If you already moved to 2.0, why do you assume noone else will ? :)

-- 
Thomas Wouters <thomas at xs4all.net>

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