Hacker News Reader

Comment by mixmastamyk | Hacker News Reader

Great work. It's a shame these nice libs weren't built a few years ago, they might have had a chance to become the default in python3. Would be a killer feature to push more people to it.

    "The entire codebase has been rearchitected"

I hope there are a few tests to check for regressions? ;)

View on HN

This is the part that concerns me. Generally, I think of code tightening in on a release, which major swings early in the processes and minor tweaks later. While I all for everything that happened in this change, I wonder if a 0.2 (or even 0.9) would have been appropriate first. Version x.0 in open source software implies "this is ready for production" (as opposed to commercial software, where it seems to mean "let the beta test really commence).

(I just noticed it is at 1.0.2 now. I think I'm going to have to give this a couple weeks before I upgrade any of my projects.)

Look out for the change to the Request constructor that makes `url` no longer the first parameter. Rather poor backward compatibility there.

It's a major revision number change, that's the only time to do such a major api change.

While your point is valid, I didn't expect this to happen with requests. Just two weeks ago, I was telling my colleague that requests is such a nice library, we have nothing to worry about when installing a new version. Simply grab the latest!

Then 1.0 happens. I have now moved requests to the "thoroughly test before upgrade" pile.

This is what major version numbers are for.

It's an interesting challenge in the open source world to deal with. In closed source software, having x.0 break things us understandable. We generally never see all the effort between x.0 and (x+1).0.

In open source, it's harder because all of that is open, which means there is a conflict between x.0 means "release" and x.0 means "development is just beginning. It probably should mean the latter.

But then having a big "It's 1.0 and fabulous!" blog post is the wrong thing to do. It probably should have been "It's 1.0; be careful!" I don't see how you can have it both ways. Linus took care of that with odd/even versioning, but I think you need a huge project for people to pay enough attention to understand unless it became a de facto standard (which it hasn't in over a decade, so it's unlikely to).

(BTW, I am very grateful for the work you've put into this. Requests is truly a model API. My comments are much more meta about versioning and open source in general (using this project as an example) and should in no way be construed as saying I think you are doing something wrong.)

Version x.0 in open source software implies "this is ready for production"

I've never really had this impression before. Do you think people would have been holding off on using a library like this because it was at 0.14 before? I'm curious where this impression comes from.

No, but I think people absolutely expect version 1.0 to be more stable than 0.14. The impression started with the linux kernel many years ago and has included many other pieces of software since. Versions either seem to mean "something changed" or "some set of features is ready". When you make a jump from 0.13 to 0.14, it is safe to assume the former. 0.14 to 1.0 tends to imply the latter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com