On Fri, 14 Apr 2017 22:19:42 -0700 Nathaniel Smith <n...@pobox.com> wrote: > > From numpy's perspective, I feel like the most important reason to > continue supporting 2.7 is our ability to convince people to keep > upgrading. (Not the only reason, but the most important.) What I mean > is: if we dropped 2.7 support tomorrow then it wouldn't actually make > numpy unavailable on python 2.7; it would just mean that lots of users > stayed at 1.12 indefinitely. Which is awkward, but it wouldn't be the > end of the world – numpy is mature software and 1.12 works pretty > well. The big problem IMO would be if this then meant that lots of > downstream projects felt that they had to continue supporting 1.12 > going forward, which makes it very difficult for us to effectively > ship new features or even bug fixes – I mean, we can ship them, but > no-one will use them.
Everyone using Python 3, which is a large and growing number of people, will be able to use the new features. I think the model you've outlined above -- a kind of "LTS" Numpy version that supports 2.7 (with some amount of maintenance going on, at least to fix important bugs), and later feature releases being 3.x-only, is the right way forward. It will lighten maintenance of later versions, allow the Numpy codebase to use modern Python idioms and stdlib features, and will leave 2.x maintenance to people who really care about it. You may already have heard of it, but Django 1.11, which was just released, is the last feature release to support Python 2. Further feature releases of Django will only support Python 3. https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.11/releases/1.11/ Regards Antoine. _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list NumPy-Discussion@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
