Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 19 Jul 2015 07:27 pm, Laura Creighton wrote:

> In the tiny corner of industrial automation where I do a lot of work,
> nobody is using 3.0.

I should hope not, because 3.0 was rubbish and is unsupported :-)

I expect you mean 3.x in general.


> It is not clear that this is ever going to change. 
> It would have to be driven by 'lack of people who know 2.x syntax'
> or something like that. Not 'third party library compatibility' because
> we really don't use them all that much.
> 
> In this corner of the world, the favourite language for developing in
> is C (because we work close to hardware) and one of the things we like
> about it, a whole lot, is that the language never changes out from
> under you.

Bug for bug compatible back to the 1970s, right? :-)

I sympathise, really I do. Particularly in the application space (Firefox,
I'm looking at you) I'm really fed up with every security update breaking
functionality, removing features, and adding anti-features.


> So there is great hope among industrial users of Python 
> that we can get a hold of a 'never going to change any more' version
> of Python, and then code in that 'forever' knowing that a code change
> isn't going to come along and break all our stuff.

Presumably they like the 2.7 features too much to go back to an even older
version. Because 2.5 or even 1.5 are pretty stable now.

I'm not kidding about 1.5, a year or two ago there was (so I'm told) a
fellow at PyCon in the US who was still using 1.5. "If it ain't broke,
don't fix it" -- he wasn't concerned about security updates, or new
features, he just needed to keep his legacy applications running.

I get it, I really do, and so do the core developers. (Well, most of them,
and certainly Guido.) It cannot be said often enough and loudly enough that
if you find yourself in the lucky position where you don't need to care
about security updates, bug fixes or new functionality, there is absolutely
nothing wrong with using an old, unmaintained, stable version forever.



-- 
Steven