Stefan Behnel, 15.03.2014 11:25:
Stefan Behnel, 10.03.2014 20:11:
given that systems using Python 2.4/5 are becoming truly rare these days (even Py2.6 officially died last year), I've decided to reduce my own maintenance burden by letting the next lxml release series (the one after 3.3) no longer support these two versions and require Py2.6, Py2.7, Py3.2 or later.
I'm also dropping support for Py3.1 because I doubt that supporting it is interesting for any reasonable number of people. Lots of other major Python packages haven't even been ported to anything below Py3.3, so being stuck with Py3.1 can't be fun anyway.
While I'm at it, I think it would also be a good idea to drop support for old libxml2/xslt versions at the same time. The latest libxml2 version is 2.9.1 and I'd like to drop support for all of 2.6.x. Even the 2.7.x series, which contains some substantial security and performance enhancements, was first released back in August 2008, so it's getting close to six years old.
Regarding libxslt, I'm not sure yet if lxml should require 1.1.26 (1.1.25 won't work) from 2009 or be content with 1.1.23 or so, which is one year older. 1.1.25 was the first to allow EXSLT functions in XPath, that would make it somewhat interesting as a target. In any case, 1.1.27/28 (released in 2012) are so substantially better that anyone using lxml for XSLT processing should try to get those installed if they're missing.
I would assume that any OS distribution that provides Python 2.6.x would also have a libxml2/libxslt from at least 2008, or likely a newer version due to security problems. And building lxml statically will (by default) use the newest versions anyway.
So, the proposed minimum requirements for the next lxml release series would then be:
Python 2.6 / 3.2 libxml2 2.7.0 libxslt 1.1.26
I was told that MacOS-X 10.6 shipped with libxml2 2.7.3 (which works quite ok) but had libxslt 1.1.24 installed. Since the libxslt backwards compatibility really isn't all that hard to keep up, I'll just set 1.1.23 (released in April 2008) as the minimum version, i.e. Python 2.6 / 3.2 libxml2 2.7.0 libxslt 1.1.23 Stefan