Kill it with fire!
On Sep 2, 2016 2:06 PM, "Donald Stufft"
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
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