Too few projects are involved in the Python beta phase

Currently, Python beta versions are available four months before the final 3.x.0 release.

Bugs reported during the beta phase can be easily fixed and can block a release if they are serious enough.

Incompatible changes are discussed during the beta phase: enhance documentation explaining how to update code, or consider to revert these changes.

Even if more and more projects are tested on the master branch of Python in their CI, too many projects of the top 50 PyPI projects are only compatible with the new Python a few weeks, or even months, after the final Python release.

DeprecationWarning is being ignored

Python has well defined process to deprecate features. A DeprecationWarning must be emitted during at least one Python release, before a feature can be removed.

In practice, DeprecationWarning warnings are ignored for years in major Python projects. Usually, maintainers explain that there are too many warnings and so they simply ignore warnings. Moreover, DeprecationWarning is silent by default (except in the __main__ module: PEP 565).

Even if more and more projects are running their test suite with warnings treated as errors (-Werror), Python core developers still have no idea how many projects are broken when a feature is removed.

Need to coordinate

When issues and incompatible changes are discovered and discussed after the final Python release, it becomes way more complicated and expensive to fix Python. Once an API is part of an official final release, Python should provide backward compatibility for the whole 3.x release lifetime. Some operating systems can be shipped with the buggy final release and can take several months before being updated.

Too many projects are only updated to the new Python after the final Python release, which makes this new Python version barely usable to run large applications when Python is released.

It is proposed to block a Python release until a compatible version of all selected projects is available.

Shorter Python release schedule

The PEP 602: Annual Release Cycle for Python and the PEP 605: A rolling feature release stream for CPython would like to release Python more often to ship new features more quickly.

The problem is that each Python 3.x release breaks many projects.

Coordinated Python releases reduces the number of broken projects and makes new Python release more usable.

Limit the delay

When a build or test issue with the next Python version is reported to a project, maintainers have one month to answer. With no answer, the project can be excluded from the list of projects blocking the Python release.

Multiple projects are already tested on the master branch of Python in a CI. Problems can be detected very early in a Python release which should provide enough time to handle them. More CI can be added for projects which are not tested on the next Python yet.

Once selected projects issues are known, exceptions can be discussed between the Python release manager and involved project maintainers on a case-by-case basis. Not all issues deserve to block a Python release.

Selected projects

List of projects blocking a Python release (total: 27):

• Projects (13):
  • aiohttp
  • cryptography
  • Cython
  • Django
  • numpy
  • pandas
  • pip
  • requests
  • scipy
  • Sphinx (needed to build Python)
  • sqlalchemy
  • pytest
  • tox
• Direct and indirect dependencies (14):
  • certifi (needed by urllib3)
  • cffi (needed by cryptography)
  • chardet (needed by Sphinx)
  • colorama (needed by pip)
  • docutils (needed by Sphinx)
  • idna (needed by Sphinx and requests)
  • jinja2 (needed by Sphinx)
  • MarkupSafe (needed by Sphinx)
  • psycopg2 (needed by Django)
  • pycparser (needed by cffi)
  • setuptools (needed by pip and tons of Python projects)
  • six (needed by tons of Python projects)
  • urllib3 (needed by requests)
  • wheel (needed by pip)

How projects are selected

Projects used by to build Python should be in the list, like Sphinx.

Most popular projects are picked from the most downloaded PyPI projects.

Most of project dependencies are included in the list as well, since a single incompatible dependency can block a whole project. Some dependencies are excluded to reduce the list length.

Test dependencies as pytest and tox should be included as well. If a project cannot be tested, a new version cannot be shipped neither.

The list should be long enough to have a good idea of the cost of porting a project to the next Python, but small enough to not block a Python release for too long.

Obviously, projects which are not part of the list also are encouraged to report issues with the next Python and to have a CI running on the next Python version.

Examples

There are different kinds of incompatible changes:

• Change in the Python build. For example, Python 3.8 removed 'm' (which stands for pymalloc) from sys.abiflags which impacts Python vendors like Linux distributions.
• Change in the C extensions build. For example, Python 3.8 no longer links C extensions to libpython, and Python 3.7 removed os.errno alias to the errno module.
• Removed function. For example, collections aliases to ABC classes have been removed in Python 3.9.
• Changed function signature:
  • Reject a type which was previously accepted (ex: only accept int, reject float).
  • Add a new mandatory parameter.
  • Convert a positional-or-keyword parameter to positional-only.
• Behavior change. For example, Python 3.8 now serializes XML attributes in their insertion order, rather than sorting them by name.
• New warning. Since more and more projects are tested with all warnings treated as errors, any new warning can cause a project test to fail.
• Function removed from the C API.
• Structure made opaque in the C API. For example, PyInterpreterState became opaque in Python 3.8 which broke projects accessing interp->modules (PyImport_GetModuleDict() should be used instead).

Cleaning up Python and DeprecationWarning

One of the Zen of Python (PEP 20) motto is:

There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.

When Python evolves, new ways emerge inevitably. DeprecationWarning are emitted to suggest to use the new way, but many developers ignore these warnings which are silent by default.

Sometimes, supporting both ways has a minor maintenance cost, but Python core developers prefer to drop the old way to clean up the Python code base and standard library. Such kind of change is backward incompatible.

More incompatible changes than usual should be expected with the end of the Python 2 support which is a good opportunity to cleaning up old Python code.