1.0 stability constraints

[Simon Cozens]

Allison Randal wrote:
> - We must migrate before 1.0 on March 17th. Part of "a stable API for 
> language developers" is a stable infrastructure.

I'm sorry to go on like a broken record about this, but string handling
*is* important: Until encoding and charset agnosticism is fixed, then
taking the pre-string-rework hotchpotch we have now and calling it "a
stable API" is going to (yet again) store up major trouble for us in the
future.

The change will be major and disruptive and there's no guarantee that it
will get done and stabilized by March 17th. In fact it's so major and
disruptive that people are balking about putting it in before 1.0
anyway. And as I've said before, the only reason it's major and
disruptive now is that we put it off for so long. The longer we go on
without it, the worse things are going to get.

So what then? Do we get 1.0 out there anyway with no proper foundation
for character set issues, putting it off once again, and then do another
bigger and more disruptive change later on to get these things right? In
what way does that make 1.0 "a stable API"?

Simon