[Julien Danjou]

> As you said, if it's not part of the stable ABI it makes sense.

I think this is a misunderstanding of what the stable ABI is for. I'm not sure whether this is spelled out explicitly anywhere, but my understanding was that ABI breakage shouldn't happen *at all* in bugfix releases, whether stable ABI or not.

The stable ABI is about feature releases within the Python 3.x series, not bugfix releases: that is, if your extension module limits itself to using the stable ABI, then a version of that module compiled for Python 3.7.x should still work for Python 3.8.x.

But lots of extension modules don't or can't restrict themselves to the stable ABI. For those modules, it should still be reasonable to expect that bugfix releases don't break the ABI: you should always be able to upgrade from Python 3.7.5 to Python 3.7.6 (for example) without having to recompile your extension modules.

Or am I misunderstanding?