Hello @hugovk
The Steering Council recently discussed PEP 2026 - Calendar versioning for Python. The SC fully sympathizes with the problems that PEP is trying to solve and we want to thank you for the well-written PEP and thoughtful discussion that you’ve led on it. We have however decided to reject the PEP. It was a close vote, with no SC member adamantly against or in favor of the proposal. The votes hovered around -0 to +0 with the -0’s mildly winning out.
In general we were encouraged that there weren’t many objections from the community, and the risks of disruption and breakage seem minimal. We had some small concern about workflows that might be incrementing Python compatibility versions with a += 1 type operation leading to invalid version numbers. Some language in the PEP about gaps in version comparisons could alleviate that concern.
While the alignment between the minor version and the year of initial release is nice, this alignment would be obscured after the first bug fix release. The PEP does mention this as a non-goal. Similarly, we think that even with this alignment, the Python community at large doesn’t fully understand Python’s support lifecycle, so even knowing that, e.g. Python 3.26.x was originally released in 2026, this wouldn’t provide a lot of help in knowing when 3.26 would reach its end-of-life. A couple of suggestions for improving the communication of version lifecycles in alternative ways include:
- Lifecycle information printed in the interactive interpreter’s banner, or some other mechanism to ask the Python executable itself to inform the user of that Python release’s support lifetime.
- Provide information about the last 5 EOL versions on the main page of docs.python.org.
- On the python.org front page, provide prominent links to Status of Python versions and/or Python | endoflife.date, both of which present nice visualizations of Python lifetimes.
The SC’s sentiment is that while there is some benefit to the PEP, overall the benefit isn’t enough to justify the PEP’s adoption.
Again, thank you for your advocacy for this PEP.