Quoting Benjamin Peterson <benja...@python.org>:
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.
I'd like to promote the idea to abandon 2.7 bug fix releases earlier than that, e.g. along with the release of 3.4. My recollection is that "we" didn't actually promise any specific time frame; I recall that Guido said that Python 2.7 would be supported "indefinitely", which is not "infinitely" [1]. The Whats New says [2] """It’s very likely the 2.7 release will have a longer period of maintenance compared to earlier 2.x versions.""" which explicitly refuses to set a date. Of course, individual committers may have promised a more specific policy publicly in the past. Since Christian asked: I'll likely continue to make binary releases for Windows as along as Benjamin declares releases to be bug fix releases. However, it will become increasingly difficult for users to actually use these releases to build extension modules since Microsoft decided to take VS 2008 Express offline (VS 2008 remains available to MSDN subscribers; getting it from a store might also be difficult in 2014). I wonder whether the burden of maintaining three branches for bug fixes (2.7, 3.3, default) and three more for security fixes (2.6, 3.1, 3.2) is really sustainable for committers. I wouldn't want to back off wrt. security fixes, and 2.6 will soon fall out of the promised 5 years (after the initial release). However, stopping to accept bug fixes for 2.7 would IMO significantly reduce the load for committers - it would certainly continue to get security fixes, and (for the time being) "indefinitely" so. Wrt. to the 3.x migration rate: I think this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Migration rate will certainly increase once we announce an end of 2.7, and then again when the end is actually reached. I'm doubtful with respect to a community-managed ongoing 2.7 bug fix release (i.e. I doubt that it will happen); the same was discussed for a next 2.x feature release, and it hasn't happened. OTOH, it is very likely that people will publish their own patches to 2.7 throughout the net, just as the Linux distributions already do. It may even happen that some volunteer offers to publish a combined repository for such patches, with various members of the community having write access to such a repository (but no formal releases coming out of that). Regards, Martin [1] http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2009-November/093651.html [2] http://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/2.7.html#the-future-for-python-2-x _______________________________________________ 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