On Sun, Nov 1, 2020, at 18:54, Jarrod Millman wrote:
> I also misunderstood the purpose of the NEP. I assumed it was
> intended to encourage projects to drop old versions of Python. Other
> people have viewed the NEP similarly:
> https://github.com/networkx/networkx/issues/4027
Of all the packages, it makes sense for NumPy to behave most conservatively with depreciations. The NEP suggests allowable support periods, but as far as I recall does not enforce minimal support.
Stephan Hoyer had a good recommendation on how we can clarify the NEP to be easier to intuit. Stephan, shall we make an ammendment to the NEP with your idea?
For reference, here was my proposed revision:
Specifically, rather than saying "the latest release of NumPy supports all versions of Python released in the 42 months before NumPy's release", it says "NumPy will only require versions of Python that were released more than 24 months ago". In practice, this works out to the same thing (at least given Python's old 18 month release cycle).
This changes the definition of the support window (in a way that I think is clearer and that works better for infrequent releases), but there is still the question of how large that window should be for NumPy. My personal opinion is that somewhere in the range of 24-36 months would be appropriate.
Best regards,
Stéfan