[Python-Dev] 2.7 Release? 2.7 == last of the 2.x line?

[Nick Coghlan]

Carl Trachte wrote:
> On 11/4/09, ssteinerX at gmail.com <ssteinerx at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Maybe the 3.x line should just be put out of our misery, merged back
>> to 2.7, 2.8, 2.9, and proceed as Glyph suggested in passing with
>> increasing levels of deprecation until it just turns into 3.x on its
>> own by running out of numbers.
> 
> <delurk>
> As a user, I'm horrified.  Granted, I'm not the most high powered
> user, but . . .
> my employer is already providing me with a 3.0 Python version on one
> of my work computers with the expectation that I'll be using it more
> and more.
> 
> Sorry to butt in, but is this a joke?  I thought all this was hashed
> out prior to inventing python 3.0.
> </delurk>

Don't worry, 3.x is still the future of the Python language. Some of the
interested onlookers are just rehashing discussions that happened years
ago *before* the 3.x branch was created. It boils down to the fact that
the real beneficiaries of the 2.x to 3.x transition are the people that
aren't using Python yet, so existing users (especially maintainers of
large libraries and frameworks) bear a disproportionate amount of the
cost of the transition while gaining little of the benefit. They're
understandably irritated by that and the situation is likely to take a
couple more years to sort itself out.

While it may be hard to tell without knowing who is and isn't a core
developer, the only point seriously under discussion is whether there is
going to be a 2.8 after 2.7, and the current answer to that is looking
to be "probably not".

Planning on that basis probably isn't a bad idea. Even if we do decide
to create a 2.8 after 3k has already been merged back to the trunk, a
new 2.8 development branch could easily be created based on the 2.7
maintenance branch instead of the trunk.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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