On 4/6/2013 5:11 PM, Georg Brandl wrote:
Am 06.04.2013 23:02, schrieb Benjamin Peterson:
Per my last message, 2.7.4 has at long last been released. I apologize
for the long interval between 2.7.3 and 2.7.4. To create more
determinism in the future, I will be soon updating PEP 373 with
approximate dates of future 2.7 bugfix releases. I will be aiming for
6 month intervals.
In 6 months, there will be a bunch more IDLE fixes (there are already
some that were too late for today's releases), so that will be good from
that standpoint. Some people will continue teaching with 2.7 for who
knows how long. I expect Idle to be considerably polished within 2 years.
This means we need to talk about how many more 2.7 releases there are
going to be. At the release of 2.7.0, I thought we promised 5 years of
bugfix maintenance, but my memory may be fuddled. At any rate, 2.7.0
was released in July 2010, which currently puts us within a few months
of 3 years of maintenance. Over the past year, I've been happy to see
a lot of movement towards 3 including the porting of important
codebases like Twisted and Django. However, there's also no doubt that
2.x is still widely used. Obviously, there will be people who would be
happy if we kept maintaining 2.7 until 2025, but I think at this
juncture 5 total years of maintenance is reasonable. This means there
will be approximately 4 more 2.7 releases.
Thoughts?
I agree that keeping to 5 years of official maintenance releases is
reasonable at present.
I do not remember if there was any promise of security fixes after 5 years.
However, in 2015 I can well imagine offers from group(s) in the community
to maintain the 2.7 branch with fixes ported from 3.x.
I can imagine that. And I can imagine no volunteers ;-). I think that
volunteering after the mid-2015 5-year release is too late in a sense.
Anybody who thinks they will want to prolong maintenance should start
working *now* to test bugfix patches on 2.7 and re-write as necessary
and earn core-developer status. I think this should be
suggested/publicized now.
Unless Benjamin volunteers to continue doing releases, at least one new
volunteer needs to learn how to do them, perhaps by working with him on
some the the remaining releases he does do.
At that point, we will have to decide how to treat releases from this
"backports" branch.
If there are at least a couple of people with 2.7 branch push
privileges, who understand and agree to follow 'bugfixes only', with due
consideration of back-compatibility, then I see no reason for such
releases not to be official PSF releases. If some people take up 2.7
after the final 2.7 release and work independently us, then it is out of
our hands. (And they will have to call their releases something other
than 'Python 2.7.z')
--
Terry Jan Reedy
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