Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 19 Jul 2015 12:33 pm, Devin Jeanpierre wrote:

[...]
> Because it helps even more people. The reason people make upstream
> contributions is so that the world benefits. If you only wanted to
> help yourself, you'd just patch CPython locally, and not bother
> contributing anything upstream.

And have your patch disappear when you upgrade Python? No thanks.


[...]
> It gets really boring submitting 2.7-specific patches, though, when
> they aren't accepted, and the committers have such a hostile attitude
> towards it. I was told by core devs that, instead of fixing bugs in
> Python 2, I should just rewrite my app in Python 3.

Really? Can you point us to this discussion?

If you are right, and that was an official pronouncement, then it seems that
non-security bug fixes to 2.7 are forbidden.

I suspect though that it's not quite that black and white. Perhaps there was
some doubt about whether or not the patch in question was fixing a bug or
adding a feature (a behavioural change). Or the core dev in question was
speaking for themselves, not for all.


> It has even been 
> implied that bugs in Python 2 are *good*, because that might help with
> Python 3 adoption.

Really? Can you point us to this discussion?

As they say on Wikipedia, Citation Needed. I would like to see the context
before taking that at face value.



-- 
Steven