<story><title>Python adopts a 12-month release cycle</title><url>https://lwn.net/Articles/803679/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>raymondh</author><text>From my point of view, the Python release cycle presents several challenges in terms of two-way communication with users.&lt;p&gt;Ideally, we want people to download the beta releases and give feedback on their real world experience with new features while there is still time to make changes.  (That is almost the entire point of a beta-release accompanied by a feature freeze).&lt;p&gt;Actual practice tends to fall short of the ideal for several reasons:&lt;p&gt;* Not many users download the beta and try out the features.  On the bug tracker, we tend to get very little feedback on our beta releases.&lt;p&gt;* Some features land with little to no documentation (the walrus operator, for example).  This makes it difficult for users to assess the feature.&lt;p&gt;* The PEP process is decisive.  Once a PEP is approved, it is too late for developers to give feedback.  The feature will happen regardless of user feedback.&lt;p&gt;* Downstream tooling needs time to update, so it is difficult to try out a beta when you can&amp;#x27;t get your dependencies to run (MyPy, Black, requests, etc).</text></comment>
<story><title>Python adopts a 12-month release cycle</title><url>https://lwn.net/Articles/803679/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>3JPLW</author><text>I was curious how this changed from their previous process.  It looks like they&amp;#x27;ve historically averaged about once per 18 months for the past few releases.&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    3.4.0 — March 2014
    3.5.0 — Sept. 2015
    3.6.0 — Dec.  2016
    3.7.0 — June  2018
    3.8.0 — Oct.  2019
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
I&amp;#x27;m not familiar with their release process — were those &amp;quot;scheduled&amp;quot; releases, too, but just at 18 months (plus a little slop for release QA)?  Or were they just ready when they were ready?</text></comment>