Hacker News Reader

> is several versions old now and they've still got over 20% breakage.

I don't think that's illustrating breakage, just the lack of an explicit declaration that the package supports a newer version of python (which may be newer than the latest release of a given package).

View on HN

Yeah... I always develop against the latest Python available and have probably run into 1 package in my career with a version incompatibility, and that was with a C API portion. 20-40% is not correct.

I assume you weren’t working with Python during the 2 to 3 transition? There were at least six years, if not more, of major libraries not supporting Python 3, of as a library author trying to write code that was 2/3 compatible, etc.

I agree that post Python 3 it is less common for a language update to break third-party libraries, but I also don’t think sweeping the 2 to 3 years under the rug is fair.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com