John> Interesting question. Just as a curious follow-up (not being
John> someone who works in the programming world), why does it take so
John> long to move to the latest version, especially when there aren't
John> (I don't think) any changes that would break existing code, such
John> as moving to Python 2.4 from 2.2 or 2.3?
There are often lots of binary interdependencies between the Python version
and internal or external packages. For instance, all the database adaptors
I'm aware of for SQL-based databases have extension modules written in C.
Then consider GUI stuff (PyGtk, wxPython, etc), scientific (SciPy, Numeric,
VTK, ...). The list can be nearly endless. At work we have lots of
in-house C++ libraries, many of which have been exposed to Python
programmers via SWIG or Boost.Python. All that stuff at minimum needs to be
recompiled with the new version of Python's header files (which can and do
change between versions). Then you have to test it.
While it's true that there are generally no semantic or syntactic
differences between versions and for the most part the developers try hard
not to break things, differences do creep into the Python level and can be
subtle to discover.
In short, it takes a fair amount of work to move from one version to
another.
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