From: Philip J. <pj...@un...> - 2010-01-06 05:22:16
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On Jan 5, 2010, at 7:45 PM, Frank Wierzbicki wrote: > First I want to say that the short term target must be 2.5.2 and the > long term goal should be 3.x. Since the 2to3 tool for moving Python > code from 2.x to 3.x requires a minimum of 2.6 - we can't jump > straight to 3.x from 2.5.x > > With that out of the way.... > > Going for 2.6 means targeting a stable released CPython and sets us up > to go for 3.x a bit more quickly. Going for 2.7 means we get to > target the current development branch of CPython -- and possibly the > last 2.x we'd ever need to support. I hope to avoid doing both -- > whichever we do might be the last supported version of Jython 2.x. I > don't think we have the manpower to continue to support 2.5 (which I'd > like to see supported for at least a few years) and two other 2.x > releases. Currently there's not much aimed for 2.7, 2.7a1's release notes have: o An ordered dictionary type o New unittest features including test skipping and new assert methods. o A much faster io module o Automatic numbering of fields in the str.format() method o Float repr improvements backported from 3.x. o Tile support for Tkinter o A backport of the memoryview object from 3.x o New syntax for nested with statements I'm not sure the float repr improvement is applicable to our platform. We lack buffer (maybe we won't by this time) so memoryview may not be applicable either. New unittest features and OrderedDict are pure python. So other than those, there's currently not much. However at this point I don't think 2.7 is that important of a release for us, so even though there's not much extra over 2.6, I'd rather aim for a shorter, "release earlier/oftener" schedule. If Python 3 adoption moves forward significantly in the next two years it may not be too important of a release for CPython either. I suspect users would prefer we focus on 3 sooner rather than later after the next major 2 release. Though time will tell, and we can always plan a 2.7 later. For us a big benefit of going directly to 2.7 would be to finally share CPython trunk's Lib/. That's attractive but it could be short lived: only from the time we switch to around 2.7rc1 scheduled for 2010-05-29. -- Philip Jenvey |