On Thu, Oct 10, 2019, at 09:34, Charles R Harris wrote:

I think we can support 3.5 as long as we please, the question is how long we *want* to support it. I don't plan to release 1.18 wheels for 3.5, but I'm concerned about making 1.18 outright incompatible with 3.5. I would like to see the random interface settle before we do that. So my preference would be to drop 3.5 in 1.19 with a future warning in the 1.18 release notes. Alternatively, we could backport all the random changes to 1.17, but I would rather not do that. 

The language in the NEP is:

"we recommend that they support at least all minor versions of Python introduced and released in the prior 42 months"

i.e., a lower bound for support, such that compatibility with more versions of Python is perfectly OK and, in the case of NumPy, probably encouraged.  The NEP is meant to lift the burden of very long support cycles from smaller projects.

Stéfan