On Sun, Dec 7, 2008 at 9:42 PM, David Cournapeau <david@ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp> wrote:
I am strongly against dropping 2.4 support anytime soon. I haven't seen a strong rationale for using >= 2.5 features in numpy, supporting 2.4 is not so hard, and 2.4 is still the default python version on many OS (mac os X 10.4 I believe, RHEL for sure, open solaris).
While my feelings aren't as strong as David's, they are pretty much identical. As a point of reference, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 won't come out until at least the first quarter of 2010. Until then we should make a serious effort to support Python 2.4, which ships with RHEL 5. It looks like RHEL 6 will be based on the upcoming Fedora 11 release, which will ship with Python 2.6. That gives us a minimum of one year for 2.4 support. Once RHEL 6 is released, it will take several months before a sizable number of users upgrade. Moin has a detailed list of Python versions for various OSes and hosting services: http://moinmo.in/PollAboutRequiringPython24 -- Jarrod Millman Computational Infrastructure for Research Labs 10 Giannini Hall, UC Berkeley phone: 510.643.4014 http://cirl.berkeley.edu/