Martijn Faassen: The Call of Python 2.8

[Chris Angelico]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 6:33 PM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
> On 4/15/2014 2:08 AM, Ben Finney wrote:
>>
>> Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> writes:
>>
>>> The 'mistake' is your OS, whatever it is, not providing 3.3. It is
>>> already so old that it is off bugfix maintenance. Any decent system
>>> should have 3.4 available now.
>>
>>
>> I think you mean “… should have Python 3.3 available now”, yes?
>
>
> ??? why would you think that??? My installed 3.4.0 for Windows is dated
> March 16.

Debian's current stable (Wheezy) was released 2013/05/04, and the
latest version release of it (7.4) was 2014/02/08. Both those dates
precede 2014/03/16, so you don't get 3.4 in Wheezy. (Actually, you
don't even get 3.3, presumably because its launch date of 2012/09/29
missed the Wheezy feature freeze in mid-2012.) Debian Jessie (current
testing) ships 3.3 and 3.4, with the 'python3' package giving you 3.3.

Stable OSes won't necessarily be jumping onto 3.4 instantly upon
availability. Debian Squeeze (oldstable, still supported) doesn't even
ship 3.2, all you get is 3.1.3. If you want Arch Linux, you know where
to find it :) And of course, that very stability is what makes it easy
to just "apt-get build-dep python3" and spin up one from source,
possibly even a 3.5-with-except-expressions for the purpose of testing
:)

ChrisA