Nick Coghlan added the comment:

PEP 476 *has* a mechanism in it that was supposed to deal with this problem, 
thus leaving *end users* in full control of the decision on when they upgrade 
their security infrastructure rather than having that decision arbitrarily 
imposed on them by a vendor or an upstream community project regardless of 
whether or not it's appropriate for their particular situation. Unfortunately, 
it turned out I was wrong about the viability of the approach in PEP 476, hence 
this suggestion to revisit the question.

There is *no* suggestion of changing the default behaviour away from that 
defined in PEP 476, the part I would like to revisit is merely the section on 
configurability, where the goal is to be able to deploy "All of PEP 476 
*except* the change in default certificate verification behaviour". The 
approach in the PEP works for folks deploying upstream Python directly, and I 
*thought* it would work for the redistributor case as well. It's the latter 
point I was wrong about.

This is a level of consideration of their needs that folks are willing to pay 
for, but it's also an expensive one to provide, so it doesn't make sense for 
upstream to provide it for free. Rather, I am asking the upstream development 
community to work with commercial redistributors to come to an accommodation 
that actually meets end users upgrade needs, rather than leaving them stuck on 
a legacy Python version with no viable path forward to more secure 
infrastructure. (Telling end users "just upgrade anyway" when complex systems 
and large scale deployments are involved doesn't work - this is why Microsoft 
ended up having to support Windows XP for 12 years)

I thought proposing a useful new feature for Python 3.5 and then proposing a 
subsequent backport would be the easiest path forward, but I now suspect a PEP 
specifically targeting an improved network security transition plan for the 
benefit of folks managing infrastructure upgrades in the 2.7.x series may be a 
better option.

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Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue23857>
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