Looking at the other replies, I'm wondering if you fully understand python's
variant of version numbering.
I suggest we change the announcement template from:
"Python 3.9.2 is the newest major release of the Python programming language,
and it contains many new features and optimizations."
to:
"Python 3.9 was the newest major release of the Python programming language,
and it contains many new features and optimizations. Python 3.9.2 is a bugfix
and security release; it has no new features relative to 3.9."
3.9.1 (and 3.9.27, if that ever happens) are supposed to the be the same as
3.9.0, except with bugs fixed.
Because "a feature is just a bug with tenure", there comes a time when
non-security bugs stop being fixed. There isn't a hard-and-fast rule on when
that is, but within a year or two. Looking back, a .6 release was unlikely to
contain much beyond security. Even before that time, CPython still tries to
err on the overly-cautious side of "can this bug-fix be backported", because of
an overly-optimistic assessment ~20 years ago. (A harmless feature was added
in a backwards-compatible way, but for a while instructions had to specify a
bugfix version as well.)
In theory, someone could release 3.9.0s1, 3.9.0s2, ... 3.9.1s1 ... but what
would be the point? 3.9.1s2 would have contained exactly the same changes as
3.9.2rc, which apparently didn't get picked up much. The difference between
3.9.2rc and 3.9.2 does include a non-security bugfix -- a part of the Windows
API that was advertised as working will now actually work. Is that really
adding much extra upgrade risk?
Of course, to get these extra releases, someone will have to be more careful
about deciding what counts as a security fix vs a regular bugfix, which is
already sometimes fuzzy. And realistically, it is *only* the security fixes
that are likely to be a problem for working code ... Even if the releases were
trivial, how much value would that actually provide?
-jJ
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