PEP Parade

[Geoff Gerrietts]

Quoting Donn Cave (donn at u.washington.edu):
> Quoth Roy Smith <roy at panix.com>:
> | "Tim Peters" <tim at zope.com> wrote:
> | > Note that Guido wants to keep 2.3 free of new core language features.  You
> | > can deduce that from reading the essay, or-- like me --you can just believe
> | > it because it's true <wink>.  There's a huge backlog of good ideas for
> | > improving the internals and libraries, and I wouldn't be surprised to see
> | > the focus remain there for 2.4 too.
> |
> | Not touching the core language is a Good Thing.    It's really tough to 
> | convince people that python is a viable tool when it's a moving target.  
> |
> | It's been somewhat of an uphill battle to get my development group to 
> | accept the fact that I write tools for the whole group's use in python.  
> | Having the core language change from version to version just makes it 
> | worse, as we discover imcompatabilities between whatever version I'm using 
> | to develop on and whateve they're running on their boxes.  Telling people, 
> | "Oh, you need to upgrade to version X" gets old pretty fast.  As the saying 
> | goes, "if you're explaining, you've already lost."
> 
> I have proposed before that those of us who are into having
> a viable tool instead of a moving target, should just pick one
> and stick with it.  2.1.1, for example.  Of course you and I
> can do that, solving the problems with our respective groups -
> but putting us in kind of a backwater.  If we sort of collectively
> agree on 2.1.1 (or whatever) for that role, though, that backwater
> could get pretty lively.

I agree with the sentiment expressed in these posts. I'm not sure if
the proposed solution is the best one. On the other hand, I know that
I would feel more comfortable pushing for adoption of a given version
if I knew that six months from now, I wouldn't hafta start the whole
push all over again because some new feature made everything uncertain
again.

I think a lot of people and projects froze on 1.5.2, because it was
the last 1.* series release, but advice in this newsgroup tends to
suggest this is a very bad idea; bugfixes haven't been pushed back
into the 1.5 series, and there's no active maintenance.

I think my fear about picking a version and sticking with it is that
the same thing would happen, again, and trying to catch the moving
target would be even harder than trying to keep up with it.

--G.

-- 
Geoff Gerrietts        <geoff at gerrietts dot net>
"Ordinarily he was insane, but he had lucid moments 
when he was merely stupid."        --Heinrich Heine