[ACCEPTED] PEP 602: Annual Release Cycle for Python

[pf_moore (Paul Moore)]

@steve.dower

In short, we have a stable release series that looks basically the same as our current releases ( 3.x.y ). The main bugfix period becomes 2 years, and security-fix period remains as it is. The next release’s beta is 6 months (or 3, I don’t really mind) overlapping with the end of the previous version’s bugfix, so that we only ever have one stable release taking bugfixes.

We also have a fast release series that is calendar versioned (“2019-09”, “2019-10”, etc.) and releases from master every month (or I could see every three months being reasonable). This becomes like a continuous alpha release, and of course us core developers have to take compatibility seriously all the time to avoid breaking users unnecessarily.

So as a user, how would I install Python? Install 3.9, then 2019-09, then 2020-04, then 2020-12, then 3.10, then…? That sounds like a pretty messy setup, as the version style for Python varies. I don’t want to just take 3.x, because I’m an early adopter, and I like shiny new features. But I don’t want to just take the dated releases, as that makes it hard for me to discuss the version I’m on with other people who are focusing on 3.X releases.

And as a library maintainer, I still have to support 3.X and YYYY-MM releases, as my users could be using either. So it’s just the complex versioning with no corresponding benefit.

And as a packaging infrastructure developer, how the heck to we re-specify the Requires-Python tag? How would a library specify >=3.10 in a way that also catches calendar versioned releases that are post 3.10? Would the packaging libraries need to hard-code 3.X release dates somehow? Or would we expect package authors to remember to encode >=3.10 OR >= 2020-08?

Basically, this seems like a solution that at best changes which groups of users see the complexity (I assume your proposal would be of benefit to other groups, like maybe standalone application developers?) And in practice, I think it will probably add complexity globally, even if it improves things for some subsets of users.

So I’m -1 on something like this.