[Jython-dev] Proposing a beta 3 for 2.7.1

[Jim B. <jim...@py...>]

Hope everyone in the US had a happy Thanksgiving yesterday!

You may have noticed that we have not done a release candidate. Me too!
This is because we have two regressions compared to 2.7.0 that must be
fixed:

* pip is no longer installs executables correctly, including itself in
ensurepip, due to shebang quoting issues on OS X; and not using
zip-executable format on Windows. (The workaround is to use jython -m pip;
this is probably why we didn't catch it earlier, because it is standard
practice to use -m pip.) See http://bugs.jython.org/issue2360

* The ssl module no longer validates certificates using system provided
certs (in our case, provided by the JRE). See
http://bugs.jython.org/issue2390

Both of these bugs are marked as urgent, which we have used in the bug
tracker to mark *blocking bugs*.

I'm still hopeful that we can resolve these very shortly. In addition, it
would still be nice, but not blocking, to get Java 9 support working. Other
bugs remain open to be fixed. Please no more regressions however ;)

We also have a number of other changes that have been made. Although the
slipped date is not great for us, by far the most important thing is for us
to have a high quality release for 2.7.1. Therefore I would like for us to
do a beta 3 so that we can shake out things better.

Given holiday realities, I'm proposing mid December for a beta 3, and mid
January for a release candidate. So this slips us by 2 months. But
regardless we will first fix our blocking bugs. The alternative, to back
out changes, is not realistic for our comparatively small group of
committers. But we will have better automated testing to prevent pip and
ssl regressing in this way in the future.

- Jim

(Tomorrow I will be on vacation for a week, sailing in the Gulf of
California out of La Paz, Mexico. I plan to be very unreachable!)