I recently came across this blog article titled Stop writing code that will break on Python 4!. Although the title mentions python 4 it is really discussing “any future major version“.
This is something we have learnt to deal with in LCFG over the years. We often have to tweak configuration slightly when developing support for new platforms and this results in lots of if/elseif/else statements based on the target platform. Once you’ve been through the platform upgrade cycle a few times you learn that the most efficient approach is to special-case the old platform and make the new platform the default. By assuming that the configuration required for the new platform will be the default going forwards (i.e. it sits in the “else” branch) you make the configuration for N+1 and also handle N+M at the same time.