alt Hacker NewsAs a maintainer of a whole bunch of open source Python libraries, my favorite thing about a new Python release is that it signifies the end of support for an older one. In this case that's Python 3.10... which means that my libraries that aim to support every current Python version can finally start embracing features from Python 3.11!
Here's the "what's new in Python 3.11" document: https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.11.html
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Enterprise distros support their python for 10 years anyway. The lack of Python LTS releases results in most versions having longer lifetimes in practice than intended:
- 3.14: Ubuntu 26.04
- 3.12: RHEL 10, Ubuntu 24.04
- 3.10: Ubuntu 22.04
- 3.9: RHEL 9
- 3.8: Ubuntu 20.04
- 3.6: RHEL 8 (EOL in 2029)So on one hand you're lagging 4 years (and 4 versions) behind, but on the other hand it's just 4 years and 4 versions. I like your approach. Without it there'd be no progress. Google has similar policy in many places.
That's how we can have nice things. People need to just write tests and let renovate automatically update packages, whose safety will be determined by said tests.
As long as 3.11 can be "embraced" without breaking on 3.10. As a user, I might still have 3.10 installed and be happy with it, or be stuck on a system that tops out at 3.10. Unpopular opinion on HN, but I really dislike "I can break users on X because Y is now out" policies :(. I guess I'm always free to just stick to an older version of the application that still supports X.
Irritatingly, even if you upgrade to the very latest Mac OS X and Xcode, you still get Python 3.9.6.
While you can give people guidance to install a more up-to-date python, everything is much, much harder than the default experience that gives them 3.9.6 (and also once you have them running a custom version with uv or something, may as well just get them to install 3.15!)