[Twisted-Python] Twisted Names strings

Glyph glyph at twistedmatrix.com
Sat Jan 19 02:12:20 EST 2013


On Jan 18, 2013, at 6:23 AM, Angelo Dell'Aera <angelo.dellaera at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 17 Jan 2013 12:15:03 -0800
> Glyph <glyph at twistedmatrix.com> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Jan 17, 2013, at 9:19 AM, exarkun at twistedmatrix.com wrote:
>> 
>>> (although testing during the /pre/-release period would have saved
>>> everyone some trouble :).
>> 
>> This bears repeating!  Not to harass you, Angelo - dealing with a
>> regression in Twisted that breaks your app is punishment enough :) -
>> but to remind everyone that this is exactly why we have the
>> pre-release testing period.
>> 
>> When you get the 13.0 release announcement, please remember that you
>> only have a week!  All you need to do is to run your respective test
>> suite and send a short email saying if you found any issues.  (Filing
>> a ticket would be nice, but if that's too much work, don't worry
>> about it: for pre-release regressions, we'll file tickets and work on
>> patches for you.)
> 
> 
> Hi Glyph,
> you're absolutely right and I'll try to do the best I can to contribute to such 
> effort from now on. 

Thanks, I appreciate that :).

> But let me say that I usually take a look at NEWS.txt before upgrading in 
> order to understand if the changes can impact my code and act properly in 
> such case. I think this case is quite different because I see no attempts to 
> properly handle code which worked perfectly fine in 12.2.0 (if the string is 
> not a bytestring raise TypeError and game over) and the new bytestring
> requirement is not mentioned at all in NEWS.txt. 
> 
> Just thinking that maybe being a little more backward-compatible and/or 
> verbose in ChangeLog when introducing potentially disrupting changes
> could greatly help in identifying issues like this one.

The problem is not that we knew it was going to break things and we didn't care - it's that we didn't notice that the backwards compatibility problem had crept in, and we mistakenly believed that existing users would be using byte strings, or that existing users using unicode strings would already have been broken.  Or we simply forgot.

The reason we need you to test your programs is so that we notice that there is a mistake that needs fixing.  If we already knew about the compatibility problem, we would not have written release notes about it, we would have fixed it before the release :).

-glyph

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