is parameter an iterable?

[Roy Smith]

Micah Elliott  <mde at micah.elliott.name> wrote:
> I recently gave up on trying to support (backport to) pre-2.2 in my
> projects.  It's been ~3 years since 2.2 released and that seem like a
> pretty reasonable support window.

It depends on what you're doing.  If you're developing for in-house
use, you have control over what you run and can upgrade whenever you
feel you can justify devoting the resources to the upgrade effort.  If
you're a one-man band, upgrading to a new version may be an hour's
work to download and install the latest and greatest.  If you're a cog
in a large organization, it may be quite a bit more hassle.

If you're developing for outside customers, it's a whole different
story.  Lots of people are running operating systems which are several
years old (heck, I'm typing this on a Windows-2000 box), and those
operating systems may have shipped with versions of langauges which
were several years old at the time they shipped.

Consider the following conversation with a prospective customer:

Prospect: "I really love your product, the price is OK, and I've got
budget approval for the purchase.  Now, what do we need to run it?"

You: "All you need is a box running Python 2.2".

Prospect: "Oh, bummer, we run 2.1 [or 2.0, or 1.5.2] in-house on all
our machines".

You: "No problem, it's easy to upgrade to 2.2"

Prospect: "Unfortunately, not around here it isn't.  I.T. owns the
servers, and they won't do the upgrade.  Looks like we won't be able
to use your product after all.  Sorry."

I'm not saying you shouldn't use new stuff, but don't fool yourself
about how long a lifetime old versions have in the field.  And, the
old adage that "The customer is always right" is a good one.