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.
> -----Original Message----- > From: Distutils-SIG [mailto:distutils-sig-bounces+tritium- > list=sdamon....@python.org] On Behalf Of Donald Stufft > Sent: Friday, September 2, 2016 5:06 PM > To: distutils sig <distutils-sig@python.org> > Subject: [Distutils] When can we kill Python 2.6 support? > > The packaging tools generally support 2.6+ and 3.(2|3)+ and that's sort of > been > where they've been at for a while now. I would like to think about what we > need > to be to start considering Python 2.6 as "too old" to support. In pip we > generally follow a usage based deprecation/removal of supported Pythons > but we > don't have any real guidelines for when something is at a low enough usage > to > consider it no longer supported and we instead just sort of wait until > someone > makes a case that it's "low enough". > > This issue tends to impact more than just pip, because once pip drops > support > for something people tend to start dropping it across the entire ecosystem > and > use pip's no longer supporting it as justification for doing so. > > I would like to take a look at Python 2.6 and try and figure out if we're at a > point that we can deprecate and drop it, and if not what is such a point. > > Looking at pure usage numbers for "modern" versions of pip (6, 7, and 8) for > downloading from PyPI I see the usage is ~3% of downloads are via Python > 2.6. > The only thing lower than Python 2.6 that is still supported is Python 3.3. > > Python 2.6 itself has been EOL since 2013-10-29 which is now just about 3 > years > ago. It's SSL module is not generally secure and requires the use of > additional > installed modules to get it to be so. I believe the only place to get a > Python 2.6 that is "supported" is through the Enterprise-y Linux Distributions > like RHEL/CentOS/etc. > > Do we think that a ~3% usage of Python 2.6 and being end-of-life'd for ~3 > years > is enough to start deprecating and dropping 2.6? If not what sort of threshold > do we think is enough? It'd be nice to get the albatross of Python 2.6 support > off from around our necks but I'm not sure how others feel. Obviously all of > the existing versions of all of the tooling will still be fully functional so > Python 2.6 users will simply need to not upgrade their tooling to continue to > work, *but* it also means that they will be left out of new packaging features > (and likewise, people can't rely on them if they still wish to support 2.6). > > Thoughts? > > — > Donald Stufft > > > > _______________________________________________ > Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig