[issue38216] Fix for issue30458 prevents crafting invalid requests

[Ned Deily]

Ned Deily <nad at python.org> added the comment:

Thanks for your comments, Greg.  Here's my take as release manager for 3.7 (and for 3.6).  What bothers me here is that we apparently changed de facto behavior between maintenance releases, in the middle of 3.7's lifecycle, without warning, no doubt because we didn't realize it would break third-party packages.  But it has and that's a big no-no.  A very important part of our maintenance strategy is that we implicitly promise our users that they can easily upgrade from any older release in a release family to the most current release without fear of incompatibilities (e.g. 3.7.0 to 3.7.4).  In return for that, we will only provide fixes for the most recent maintenance release in a family (e.g. once 3.7.5 is released, 3.7.4 is dead and 2.7.3 through 3.7.0 were already dead).  So it seems here we have violated that compatibility promise for 3.7 and 3.6 and are about to do so for 3.5 and 2.7.  Since at least one project is known to have been impacted, it's not unreasonable to expect that more will be.  So I think we should avoid such breakage and undo the change in behavior for 3.7 (and the older releases as well).

Now, as for 3.8, as it hasn't released yet, we have more latitude and, although we're close to producing an RC, it may still be OK to document the changed behavior there.  That should be Łukasz's call.

Does that make sense?

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<https://bugs.python.org/issue38216>
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