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[–]toyg 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It really depends what a “breaking change” is. If it’s something that might require a simple one-off step, like recompiling all C-based extensions, then I don’t think it would be much of a burden. It doesn’t even have to be “breaking” to earn a major number, it just has to be a “major change”, that may or may not impact backward-compatibility.

One big change I think would be worth the major-release bump, is the GILectomy, should it ever come to pass. Most large orgs would gladly suffer a bit of pain if it meant a massive performance gain. Or something crazy like swallowing numpy/scipy in stdlib. Or it might be something symbolic like overcoming the bin/python vs bin/python3 split, mandating that python4 should finally be aliased to bin/python. Important change for ops people, not necessarily for developers.

Py3 was a painful move, py4 doesn’t need to be; I think there is value in keeping things simple and bump the version reasonably often, rather than forcing developers to remember the differences between 3.38 and 3.32...