On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 5:25 PM, Jive Dadson <notonthe...@noisp.com> wrote:
> I just found another module that broke when I went to 2.6. Gnuplot. > Apparently one of its routines has a parameter named "with." That used to > be okay, and now it's not. > > Once I get everything to work under 2.6, I am using it forever or until new > releases no longer break working code, whichever comes first. > Yeaaah, this is slightly crazy as an expectation. Python is -very- conservative with adding new keywords, but we do it sometimes. Yeah, 'with' became a keyword in 2.6... which we've been saying it would for 4 or so years, and Python 2.5 was nice enough to give a deprecation warning for if you tried to use it. Major Python releases-- 2.x to 2.6-- are ... major. They aren't like little patches which MS releases for WinXP on tuesdays, that comparison doesn't even vaguely make sense. Its more like Win2k to WinXP to Vista to Win7. And each of those, y'know, broke quite a few programs before the developers fixed them up. Its impossible to evolve a product with 100% backwards compatibility. Python attempts to be as backwards compatible as possible, but depending on how long often you do upgrades (2.4->2.5->2.6 is much less painful then 2.3->2.6 for example) and how much you know what you're doing (what packages are and how they work for instance), it will vary how much effort it takes for you to support a new version. Maybe none: I'm upgrading our core system at work with a total of about 400k lines of python code including third-party libraries and some autogenerated stuff, and about 110k of just people-written code, from Python 2.4 to 2.6... and it all just works so far. Yeah... if you use a lot of third-party libraries, you have to wait until they upgrade before you can, especially if they're C libraries. Its really, really, really not that big of a deal. Major releases happen only every couple of years. But feel free to stay on 2.6. Its a perfectly nice platform. I'm looking forward to 2.7, myself. --S
-- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
