Maintaining a backported module

[Paul Rubin]

Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> writes:
> As some of you are aware, I have a module accepted into the standard 
> library:
> http://docs.python.org/3.4/library/statistics.html

Wow, neat, I had seen something about the module and thought it looked
great, but I didn't realize you were the author.  Awesome!

> Any suggestions for managing bug fixes and enhancements to two
> separate code-bases without them diverging too much?

I haven't touched 3.x yet, but I found with a little bit of care in
resisting use of new features, I was able to implement in the
intersection of 2.x and 1.5, so the same code worked in both.  That
avoided the need for two codebases in the stuff I did.  I don't know if
it would be more difficult with the stats module.