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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

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  Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed? Laura Creighton <lac@openend.se> - 2015-07-19 11:27 +0200
    Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed? Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> - 2015-07-19 23:59 +1000
      Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed? Laura Creighton <lac@openend.se> - 2015-07-19 16:15 +0200
      Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed? Laura Creighton <lac@openend.se> - 2015-07-19 16:18 +0200

#94110 — Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

In a message of Sat, 18 Jul 2015 19:36:33 -0400, Terry Reedy writes:
>If the vast majority of Python programmers are focused on 2.7, why are 
>volunteers to help fix 2.7 bugs so scarce?

Because volunteers to fix any bugs are scarce?  Because most people really
only think of bug fixing when they have one, and when they get that
one fixed they drop back into thinking that everything is perfect?

>Does they all consider it perfect (or sufficient) as is?
>
>Should the core developers who do not personally use 2.7 stop 
>backporting, because no one cares if they do?
>
>-- 
>Terry Jan Reedy

In the tiny corner of industrial automation where I do a lot of work,
nobody is using 3.0.  It is not clear that this is ever going to change.
It would have to be driven by 'lack of people who know 2.x syntax'
or something like that. Not 'third party library compatibility' because
we really don't use them all that much.

In this corner of the world, the favourite language for developing in
is C (because we work close to hardware) and one of the things we like
about it, a whole lot, is that the language never changes out from
under you.  So there is great hope among industrial users of Python
that we can get a hold of a 'never going to change any more' version
of Python, and then code in that 'forever' knowing that a code change
isn't going to come along and break all our stuff.

Bug fixes aren't supposed to do this, of course, in the same way that
backporting of features do, but every so often something that was
introduced to fix bug X ends up breaking something else Y.  If the
consequences of a bug can be 10s of thousands of Euros lost, you
can see the appeal of 'this isn't going to happen any more'.

While nobody likes to get bit by bugs, there is some sort of fuzzy
belief out there that the bugs fixes that have gone into 2.7 are
more about things that we would never run into, and thus we get the
risk of change without the benefit of the bugfix.  This belief isn't
one that people substantiate -- it is 'just a feeling'.

So from this corner of the world, which admittedly is a very small corner,
yes, the news is 'Life is good.  Please leave us alone.'  This is in
large part, I think, due to the belief that 'if things aren't breaking,
things are perfect' which is completely untrue, but that's the way
people are thinking.

Laura

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#94118

On Sun, 19 Jul 2015 07:27 pm, Laura Creighton wrote:

> In the tiny corner of industrial automation where I do a lot of work,
> nobody is using 3.0.

I should hope not, because 3.0 was rubbish and is unsupported :-)

I expect you mean 3.x in general.


> It is not clear that this is ever going to change. 
> It would have to be driven by 'lack of people who know 2.x syntax'
> or something like that. Not 'third party library compatibility' because
> we really don't use them all that much.
> 
> In this corner of the world, the favourite language for developing in
> is C (because we work close to hardware) and one of the things we like
> about it, a whole lot, is that the language never changes out from
> under you.

Bug for bug compatible back to the 1970s, right? :-)

I sympathise, really I do. Particularly in the application space (Firefox,
I'm looking at you) I'm really fed up with every security update breaking
functionality, removing features, and adding anti-features.


> So there is great hope among industrial users of Python 
> that we can get a hold of a 'never going to change any more' version
> of Python, and then code in that 'forever' knowing that a code change
> isn't going to come along and break all our stuff.

Presumably they like the 2.7 features too much to go back to an even older
version. Because 2.5 or even 1.5 are pretty stable now.

I'm not kidding about 1.5, a year or two ago there was (so I'm told) a
fellow at PyCon in the US who was still using 1.5. "If it ain't broke,
don't fix it" -- he wasn't concerned about security updates, or new
features, he just needed to keep his legacy applications running.

I get it, I really do, and so do the core developers. (Well, most of them,
and certainly Guido.) It cannot be said often enough and loudly enough that
if you find yourself in the lucky position where you don't need to care
about security updates, bug fixes or new functionality, there is absolutely
nothing wrong with using an old, unmaintained, stable version forever.



-- 
Steven

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#94121

In a message of Sun, 19 Jul 2015 23:59:29 +1000, "Steven D'Aprano" writes:
>On Sun, 19 Jul 2015 07:27 pm, Laura Creighton wrote:
>
>> In the tiny corner of industrial automation where I do a lot of work,
>> nobody is using 3.0.
>
>I should hope not, because 3.0 was rubbish and is unsupported :-)
>
>I expect you mean 3.x in general.

indeed.  Or should I be saying Python 3000.

>Bug for bug compatible back to the 1970s, right? :-)

Exactly.

>> So there is great hope among industrial users of Python 
>> that we can get a hold of a 'never going to change any more' version
>> of Python, and then code in that 'forever' knowing that a code change
>> isn't going to come along and break all our stuff.
>
>Presumably they like the 2.7 features too much to go back to an even older
>version. Because 2.5 or even 1.5 are pretty stable now.
>
>I'm not kidding about 1.5, a year or two ago there was (so I'm told) a
>fellow at PyCon in the US who was still using 1.5. "If it ain't broke,
>don't fix it" -- he wasn't concerned about security updates, or new
>features, he just needed to keep his legacy applications running.

I have 1.5 code out there.  Unless something breaks there is
no way that I will get permission to ever change it.

>I get it, I really do, and so do the core developers. (Well, most of them,
>and certainly Guido.) It cannot be said often enough and loudly enough that
>if you find yourself in the lucky position where you don't need to care
>about security updates, bug fixes or new functionality, there is absolutely
>nothing wrong with using an old, unmaintained, stable version forever.

Well, Terry asked.

In my corner of the world -- well, iterators are cool.  Though a
ton of my code broke when we got a 'yield' keyword, as I had used
that as a function name all over the place ...  But aside from
that, pretty much nothing post 1.5.2 really made a difference for
us.  Some bugs in struct got fixed, and that was nice, but, well
on the whole we'd like stone cold dead.
>-- 
>Steven

Laura

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#94122

In a message of Sun, 19 Jul 2015 23:59:29 +1000, "Steven D'Aprano" writes:

>Bug for bug compatible back to the 1970s, right? :-)

No, till the last posix in 1989 or so.  Definitely not to the 1970s
as we want v7 c structs and x++ not the v6 ++x version.

:)

Laura

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