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

[Ray]

John Salerno wrote:
> > However I wonder, how fast are you guys moving from version to version
> > at work?
>
> 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, the thing is that migration in practice is usually a messy
business, especially as your application grows in size + complexity.
When your application is small and simple, usually migration is
relatively painless, and the assumption that a release is compatible
with the previous ones therefore your application shouldn't break
usually holds true.

However, when your apps are big and mission critical... for some reason
they just break more often ;-) Like last time we migrated our automated
build system to the latest bugfix release of the software (Ant,
specifically--see ant.apache.org if you're curious).

Everything *should* be working just fine, after all it's just a bugfix
release. But it turned out that one of the bugfixes (which was meant to
optimize the build cycle) actually broke our system in a subtle and
mysterious way, and for the longest time we resisted rolling back our
system because nobody was willing to believe that Ant, which is an
Apache project, and written by people probably smarter than us, and
being used by a LOT of Java teams around the world, could be the cause.


That was just one example from the Enterprise Java world, I'm sure the
others can supply a lot more stories from the Python world...

Regards,
Ray

> 
> Thanks.