Hello, fellow developers. On behalf of Python team, I would like to announce that we're officially discontinuing support for Python 2.5, Python 3.1 and PyPy 1.9.
If you still actively use any of those implementations, please migrate to a newer version. We have ensured already that no in-tree package doesn't support one of the newer implementations. I have just committed a package.mask and use.mask entries for them and unless anybody objects strongly, we will remove them in 30 days from now. After the removal, we will disable the support for them in the eclasses and proceed with semi-automated update of PYTHON_COMPAT. Any questions shall arise, please do not hesitate to reply to gentoo-dev@ or discuss in bug #480070 [1] that is dedicated to the issue. [1]:https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=480070 A short rationale: The Python team is finding it difficult to maintain the old Python implementations. Since we tend to run the newest versions, the old ones don't receive proper testing and we can either rely on the tests (which not all packages have) or simple manual testing that consumes a lot of time. Furthermore, upstreams tend to test their packages with newer versions, and therefore the test failures are much more common with the old versions. Addressing those usually involves much more effort than benefit. Python 2.5 dates back to 2006. It had last security fix mid-2011 as v2.5.6 but the newest in the tree is v2.5.4 which proves that it's unmaintained. The following version -- 2.6 -- has much better support for Python3 compatibility and therefore projects aiming at supporting both Python2 & Python3 are often dropping support for 2.5. This became especially visible when dev-python/pil has been introduced to the tree, as a replacement for dev-python/imaging. Since PIL supports 2.6 up to 3.3 and imaging 2.5 up to 2.7, it became no longer possible to easily have all the listed implementations enabled. That's why most of developers simply disabled 2.5 and it stopped receiving any testing. Python 3.1 dates back to 2009. It's the second Python3 'slot', that has serious improvements over 3.0. However, it's still not as good as 3.2 and therefore most of effort on switching to Python3 focuses on 3.2+. I've been told that this version has some API incompatibilities that make it hard to write portable Py2+3 code that works in 3.1, and that's why a number upstreams doesn't support it. I have no strong proof of that. Additionally, a first alpha of Python 3.4 has been released a few days ago. Considering that, we will be getting a new Python 3 version to maintain soon enough and we should make some space for it. PyPy support is still mostly experimental and buggy. All PyPy versions so far reuse the standard library from Python 2.7, therefore there is no specific reason to keep multiple slots. Moreover, PyPy 2.1 was just released and we'll be adding it soon; and PyPy3 2.1 (Python3 variant) will be released soon. -- Best regards, Michał Górny
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