Kill it with fire!
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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