[Python-Dev] Drop OS/2 and VMS support?

Victor Stinner victor.stinner at haypocalc.com
Tue Apr 19 15:46:14 CEST 2011


Hi,

I asked one year ago if we should drop OS/2 support: Andrew MacIntyre,
our OS/2 maintainer, answered:
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2010-April/099477.html

Extract: << The 3.x branch needs quite a bit of work on OS/2 to 
deal with Unicode, as OS/2 was one of the earlier OSes with full 
multiple language support and IBM developed a unique API.  I'm still 
struggling to come to terms with this, partly because I myself don't 
"need" it. >>

So one year later, Python 3 does still not support OS/2.

--

About VMS: I don't know if anyone is using Python (2 or 3) on VMS, or if
Python 3 does work on VMS. I bet that it does just not compile :-)

I don't know anyone using VMS or OS/2.

--

There are 39 #ifdef VMS and 52 #ifdef OS2. We can keep them and wait
until someone work on these OSes to ensure that the test suite pass. But
if nobody cares of these OSes and nobody wants to maintain them, it
would be easier for the maintenance of the Python source code base to
remove specific code.

Well, not "remove" directly, but plan to remove it using the PEP 11
procedure (mark OS/2 and VMS as unsupported, and remove the code in
Python 3.4).

Victor



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