Published at LXer:

Release engineering for a large project is always a tricky task. Balancing the needs of new features, removing old cruft, and bug fixing while still producing releases in a timely fashion is difficult. Python is currently struggling with this as it is trying to determine which things go into a 3.0.1 release versus those that belong in 3.1.0. The discussion gives a glimpse into the thinking that must go on as projects decide how, what, and when to release. It is very common to find bugs shortly after a release that would seem to necessitate a bug fix release. Ofttimes these are bugs that would have been considered show-stopping had they been found before the release. But what about features that were supposed to be dropped, after having been deprecated for several releases, but were mistakenly left in? That is one of the current dilemmas facing Python.

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