How ahead are you guys in the (Python) real world?

[Tim Golden]

[John Salerno]

| Interesting question. Just as a curious follow-up (not being 
| someone who works in the programming world), why does it take 
| so long to move to the latest version, especially when there 
| aren't (I don't think) any changes that would break existing 
| code, such as moving to Python 2.4 from 2.2 or  2.3?

Well, one answer would be: because it's really quite hard to
work out if there are, in fact, no changes which would break
existing code. Obviously, if everything's nicely tied up with
tests etc. it should be plain-sailing. But if it's not...

On Windows, you need to make sure you have or can build 
newly-linked .pyds for all your non-Python extensions.
And you may well find that those extensions have had
version bumps you haven't tracked since you first installed
them... and the available binaries may not match the version
you were using. So back to those tests you haven't got. Repeat 
to fade...

Ultimately, an amount depends on the time / resource someone is
prepared to commit to an uprade, given that the thing's running
fine now. After all, you can always run several Python versions 
in parallel -- albeit with a judicious use of shortcuts etc. --
if you have code which wants to make use of juicy new features?

TJG

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