Dropping support for Python versions as they go EOL in existing Django releases would be disruptive. Distros "support" Python versions longer than the PSF does. If a Django version inadvertently breaks compatibility with an old version of Python because we stop testing with it, we'll get bug reports about it. It's happened before although I can't remember the exact circumstances offhand. It's not good to put users in the position of unpredictably being unable to update to a Django security release because their Python is old and a security update inadvertently broke compatibility. That would be a heavy stick whereas there's already been some hesitance here to the "carrot" argument of the current policy which restricts older Python users to a Django LTS.
I also thought about something like "support X versions of Python," and while I haven't studied the implications in detail, it doesn't strike me as significantly better or worse than the alternatives. I think we should wait a few years to see how Python's annual releases interplay with Linux distros before considering making Django's Python support policy more aggressive in dropping old Python versions. On Tuesday, November 24, 2020 at 3:41:29 AM UTC-5 carlton...@gmail.com wrote: > Hi Tim. > > Thanks for the breakdown, and context on the rationale. > > Do you think we can drop support for Python versions as they go EOL? > i.e. for Django 2.2 we COULD HAVE stopped testing against Python 3.5 when > it went EOL earlier this year. > Given the backport policy, there's no reason to suspect it would break, > but we'd not guarantee that. > (I do worry a bit about saying we support somebody else's EOL software...) > > Assuming that, there's a diagram in PEP 602 (on the Annual Release Cycle) > that shows we'd essentially be on the hook for 5 Python versions forever. > https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0602/#the-testing-matrix > > If that's too many, how would something like "Django supports the latest 4 > versions of Python" sound? > This would mean dropping the oldest version ≈12 months before it reached > end of life. > (We'd have to think about mapping to our 8 month release cycle.) > > Kind Regards, > > Carlton > > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers (Contributions to Django itself)" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/583eb421-345f-4e19-b713-aeac9a1bca55n%40googlegroups.com.
