Martijn Faassen: The Call of Python 2.8

[Ben Finney]

Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> writes:

> 3.4.0 was released a month ago with Windows and Mac installers and
> source for everything else. I know Ubuntu was testing the release
> candidate so I presume it is or will very soon have 3.4 officially
> available. Since there was a six month series of alpha, beta, and
> candidate releases, with an approximate final release data, any
> distribution that wanted to be up to date also could be.

Those assertions assume that:

* operating systems have stable releases every few months; and

* they have a zero-length process to get a stable release of Python into
  the stable OS release; and

* the user is always running the latest stable OS version immediately
  after its release.

When, in reality, the OS team will need quite a long time to ensure the
stable Python release works smoothly with all of the rest of the OS; the
stable release will come some number of months after that assurance
process is complete; and the user will upgrade some wildly varying time
after the stable OS release is complete.

That reality means “any decent OS will have Python 3.4 today” rather
bold, only a month after its release, and eliminates just about all OSen
from “decent” category.

On the other hand, you might have meant “Python 3.4 is available *for*
any decent OS today”; this is a very different thing from the OS having
that version of Python.

-- 
 \             “We can't depend for the long run on distinguishing one |
  `\         bitstream from another in order to figure out which rules |
_o__)               apply.” —Eben Moglen, _Anarchism Triumphant_, 1999 |
Ben Finney