There was previous discussions about uncoupling the stdlib (python libraries) from the release and have them being released independently, but I can’t remember why that died off
That's the usual case, but it can definitely also happen because of the language - see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51337939 .
> There was previous discussions about uncoupling the stdlib (python libraries) from the release and have them being released independently, but I can’t remember why that died off
This sort of thing is mainly a social problem.
Well yes, but sometimes the features provided by stdlib can feel pretty 'core'. I remember that how dataclasses work for example changed and broke a lot of our code when we upgraded from 3.8 to 3.10,
There have also been breaking changes in the C API. We have one project at work that is stuck at 3.11 since a third party dependency won't build on 3.12 without a rewrite.
I wish they would stick to semantic versioning tho.
I have used two projects that got stuck in incompatible changes in the 3.x Python.
That is a fatal problem for Python. If a change in a minor version makes things stop working, it is very hard to recommend the system. A lot of work has gone down the drain, by this Python user, trying to work around that