On 21.06.2014 22:34, Chris Angelico wrote: > On Sun, Jun 22, 2014 at 2:57 AM, M.-A. Lemburg <m...@egenix.com> wrote: >> On 21.06.2014 12:51, Nick Coghlan wrote: >>> Such code has an easy fix available, though, as sys.version_info has >>> existed since 2.0, and handles two digit micro releases just fine. The >>> docs for sys.version also have this explicit disclaimer: "Do not >>> extract version information out of it, rather, use version_info and >>> the functions provided by the platform module." >> >> I don't think that's a good argument. Of course, there are >> better ways to figure out the version number, but fact is, >> existing code, even in the stdlib, does use and parse >> the sys.version string version. >> >> During Python's lifetime, we've always avoided two digit >> version numbers, so people have been relying on this, even >> if it was never (AFAIK) documented anywhere. > > It's going to be a broken-code-breaking change that's introduced in a > point release, but since PEP 404 implicitly says that there won't be a > 2.10.0, there's no way around that. Although actually, a glance at the > stdlib suggests that 2.10.0 (or 3.10.0) would break a lot more than > 2.7.10 would break - there are places where sys.version[:3] is used > (or equivalents like "... %.3s ..." % sys.version), or a whole-string > comparison is done against a two-part version string (eg: sys.version >> = "2.6"), and at least one place that checks sys.version[0] for the > major version number, but I didn't find any that look at > sys.version[:5] or equivalent. Everything that cares about the > three-part version number seems to either look at > sys.version.split()[0] or sys.version_info. Do you know where this > problematic code is? > > I checked this in the 2.7.3 stdlib as packaged on my Debian Wheezy > system, for what it's worth.
There are no places in the stdlib that parse sys.version in a way that would break wtih 2.7.10, AFAIK. I was just referring to the statement that Nick quoted. sys.version *is* used for parsing the Python version or using parts of it to build e.g. filenames and that's really no surprise. That said, and I also included this in my answers to the questions that Nick removed in his reply, I don't think that a lot of code would be affected by this. I do believe that we can use this potential breakage as a chance for improvement. See the last question (listed here again)... 1. Is it a good strategy to ship to Python releases for every single OpenSSL security release or is there a better way to handle these 3rd party issues ? 2. Should we try to avoid two digit patch level release numbers by using some other mechanism such as e.g. a release date after 2.7.9 ? 3. Should we make use of the potential breakage with 2.7.10 to introduce a new Windows compiler version for Python 2.7 ? My answers to these are: 1. We should use dynamic linking instead and not let OpenSSL bugs trigger Python releases; 2. It's not a big problem; 3. Yes, please, since it is difficult for people to develop and debug their extensions with a 2008 compiler, when the rest of the world has long moved on. -- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com Professional Python Services directly from the Source (#1, Jun 21 2014) >>> Python Projects, Consulting and Support ... http://www.egenix.com/ >>> mxODBC.Zope/Plone.Database.Adapter ... http://zope.egenix.com/ >>> mxODBC, mxDateTime, mxTextTools ... http://python.egenix.com/ ________________________________________________________________________ 2014-06-17: Released eGenix PyRun 2.0.0 ... http://egenix.com/go58 2014-06-09: Released eGenix pyOpenSSL 0.13.3 ... http://egenix.com/go57 2014-07-02: Python Meeting Duesseldorf ... 11 days to go eGenix.com Software, Skills and Services GmbH Pastor-Loeh-Str.48 D-40764 Langenfeld, Germany. CEO Dipl.-Math. Marc-Andre Lemburg Registered at Amtsgericht Duesseldorf: HRB 46611 http://www.egenix.com/company/contact/ _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com