On 3 September 2016 at 07:47, <tritium-l...@sdamon.com> wrote: > Nick might have something better to say about this, but I don’t think > catching enterprise-y linux distros like RHEL out of the blue is a good way > to go, so even if we decide right now to drop 2.6 support, it shouldn’t > actually ship with breaking changes for like... 3 months? Maybe a little > more or little less.
It won't (or at least shouldn't) be out of the blue: http://www.curiousefficiency.org/posts/2015/04/stop-supporting-python26.html ;) From a specifically Red Hat perspective, it's probably worth mentioning that Red Hat doesn't commercially support pip in conjunction with any version of Python 2.6 - we only provide a Red Hat supported pip for the Software Collections runtimes, and the lowest version of Python we provide as an SCL is 2.7. My "Developing in Python on Red Hat Platforms" talk with Graham Dumpleton in the DevNation/Red Hat Summit cross-over track this year [1] was also basically telling people "Stop using the system Python to run your own stuff, especially on RHEL 6", and advocating the use of higher level alternatives like OpenShift v3, Software Collections, and Ansible instead (depending on whether you were writing network services, client applications, or system administration scripts). So if pip 9.0 were to deprecate Python 2.6 support, I think that would be an entirely reasonable decision for PyPA to make from an upstream maintainability perspective - if folks genuinely want long term infrastructure software maintenance for Python projects, they need to be pestering commercial redistributors about funding that, rather than assuming volunteers will always deliver it for free even when they're running newer Python versions themselves. The deprecation cycle would then mainly be about giving pip's *community* users a heads up that CI testing against Python 2.6 was being dropped, with Python 2.7+ likely becoming a requirement in a future version. Cheers, Nick. [1] http://www.slideshare.net/ncoghlan_dev/developing-in-python-on-red-hat-platforms-devnation-2016 -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
