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Clarify definition of "minor" vs "major" release #105844
Description
Activity
Most of the time this is not a big concern but particularly for statements about long-term compatibility (like the C API page above) I think this is rather confusing.
I don't follow; I cannot not find any version inconsistencies on https://docs.python.org/3/c-api/stable.html. As far as I can see, minor version is used consistently there.
The FAQ is slightly inconsistent, though. Perhaps PEP-602 also needs an update1.
Footnotes
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PEP issues must be reported to https://github.com/python/peps; python.org inconsistencies at https://github.com/python/pythondotorg) ↩
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- Reacted by James Webber
I don't follow; I cannot not find any version inconsistencies on https://docs.python.org/3/c-api/stable.html. As far as I can see, minor version is used consistently there.
The FAQ is slightly inconsistent, though. Perhaps PEP-602 also needs an update.
Yeah I just meant it was confusing to me when looking across multiple places. In particular the announcement of new releases got me used to thinking of them as "major". Thanks for the updates!
- added a commit that references this issue
on Jun 16, 2023 See @CAM-Gerlach's review of python/peps#3174 (python/peps#3174 (review)). I see now that my docs update could be made even clearer, by using the established release naming convention used in the devguide. 3.11 and 3.12 are feature releases, not minor releases.
Reacted by James Webber and C.A.M. Gerlach- changed the title
[-]definition of "minor" vs "major" release[/-][+]Clarify definition of "minor" vs "major" release[/+]on Jun 18, 2023
Documentation
I noticed this in a discussion but it was off-topic there. Either I'm misreading things, but it seems like the definition of major and minor release is inconsistent in the documentation. See this page (bold mine):
Here, the
11in3.11is referred to as a minor release: the API can change when that changes, but within such a release it should be stable.In other parts of Python documentation, most notably python.org, 3.11 (or 3.10, etc) is referred to as a "major release".
The FAQ is less than clear on this (again bold mine):
Most of the time this is not a big concern but particularly for statements about long-term compatibility (like the C API page above) I think this is rather confusing.
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