Python milestone releases

[Anthony Baxter]

On Fri, 06 Aug 2004 10:25:17 +0200, "Martin v. Löwis"
<martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:
> The Python Business Forum once tried to attack the problem
> by planning to release a "Python-in-a-tie" release. This
> release would be maintained essentially forever, and they
> wanted PythonLabs to commit that this release is not
> superceded by another release for atleast a year. Python
> 2.2 was chosen as the basis, and indeed, it lived for 18
> months without a successor. Today, 2.2 is not maintained
> anymore by the "usual" maintainers, which have moved towards
> 2.3 and 2.4. Nobody has taken over maintenance of 2.2,
> from which I conclude there is really no need for ongoing
> maintenance of old releases.

My approach is that I'm happy to manage releases like so:

Python 2.x
Python 2.x.1
Python 2.x.2
....
Python 2.(x+1)
Python 2.x.n -- one last release of the old branch
Python 2.(x+1).1
....

That is, only one branch "under maintenance" at a time. I thought 
about maintaining 2.2 for longer, but really could see no reason to
do so. It increases the workload of committers, who now might have
to backport to two separate branches as well as the trunk.

Having said that, if someone else wants to step forward and continue
to maintain 2.3 past 2.3.5 (which is the last release of 2.3 I plan to do),
they're more than welcome to do so.