[zahlman]

> A language changes how something behaves in a new revision, suddenly 20 year old bedrock tools are getting massively patched to accommodate both new and old behavior.

In my estimation, the only "20 year old bedrock tools" in Python are in the standard library - which currently holds itself free to deprecate entire modules in any minor version, and remove them two minor versions later - note that this is a pseudo-calver created by a coincidentally annual release cadence. (A bunch of stuff that old was taken out recently, but it can't really be considered "bedrock" - see https://peps.python.org/pep-0594/).

Unless you include NumPy's predecessors when dating it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NumPy#History). And the latest versions of NumPy don't even support Python 3.9 which is still not EOL.

Requests turns 15 next February (https://pypi.org/project/requests/#history).

Pip isn't 20 years old yet (https://pypi.org/project/pip/#history) even counting the version 0.1 "pyinstall" prototype (not shown).

Setuptools (which generally supports only the Python versions supported by CPython, hasn't supported Python 2.x since version 45 and is currently on version 80) only appears to go back to 2006, although I can't find release dates for versions before what's on PyPI (their own changelog goes back to 0.3a1, but without dates).