Neil Schemenauer writes: > On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 09:06:15PM -0800, Brett Cannon wrote:
> > If people start taking the carrots we have added to 3.x and > > backporting them to keep the 2.x series alive you are essentially > > making the 3.x DOA by negating its benefits which I personally > > don't agree with. Well, I think it's *worse* than that, and I don't think you really mean "DOA", anyway. (Feel free to correct me, of course.) The problem I see with backporting lots of stuff, and/or adding new features that aren't in 3.0, to 2.x is that it will make 2.x even cruftier, when it was already crufty enough that Guido (and almost all of python-dev) bit the bullet and said "backward compatibility is no excuse for keeping something in 3.0". That surely means that a lot of python-dev denizens will declare non-support 2.x for x > 7. It's not going to be the gradual migration we've seen over the past few months as active people start to spend more and more time on 3 vs. 2; it will be a watershed. Especially if these are new features merged from outside that the "small active segment" doesn't know anything about. From the users' point of view, that amounts to a *fork*, even if it's internal and "friendly". > I think we have got to the heart of our disagreement. Assume that > some superhuman takes all the backwards compatible goodies from 3.x > and merges them into 2.x. Isn't that a bit ridiculous? I just don't see any evidence that anything like that is going to happen. Worse, if we *assume* it will happen, I don't see any way to assess whether (1) Python 3 goes belly up, (2) there's an effective fork confusing the users and draining the energy of python-dev, or (3) everybody goes "wow!" because it's so cool that everybody wants to keep maintaining an extra 3 branches indefinitely. My opinion is that given the clear direction the "small active segment" is going, telling the users anything but what Brett proposed is disinformation. > I guess I have more confidence in Python 3 than you do. I don't see > why Python 2.x needs to be artificially limited so that Python 3 can > benefit. It's not for Python 3, which you, I, and I'm pretty sure Brett-in-his- heart-of-hearts agree can take care of itself because it is *better* than Python 2. It's for Python, and for the Python community. _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
