Weeknotes 2021 WK 2

Preparing Django 3.2

Another week all about the Django 3.2 feature freeze, which was Thursday.

I had a (too) long list of tickets that I really wanted to get done in time. In the end we bumped one as too-hot but got the rest in, so it was a good result. I branched stable/3.2.x on Thursday afternoon, and had a little energy left to triage a few new tickets, that had built up whilst we’d been head down on reviews.

We’ve got a single ticket left to review, allowing use of Python 3.9’s zoneinfo timezone objects, before a full switch (with deprecation shim) planned for Django 4.0.

All in all, Django 3.2 has shaped up to be yet another great release. It continues to amaze me how Django continues to ripen at such a great pace, even after 15 years of active development. It’s not like we’re really adding major features all that often, there’s no ”Added caching framework”, but every release there’s just awesome features which add depth and refinement — look back at the feature added to the ORM over the last few released.

Obviously, a biased opinion but, combine that with the ease of updating — install the new version, adjust for a few minor depredations, and you’re done — and I can’t help but see the latest major version of Django as such a nice sweet spot to be in development wise. It’s not the latest hotness sure, and it has things to learn, and places to grow, but in terms of getting stuff, it’s unbeatable.

The Django 3.2 alpha will be next week. Install, run it on your CI, tell us what broke. Django 3.2 is due April.