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
At least several months, if not years. RedHat supports each version 7 years, for instance (I don't ask for that long). Currently, I'm still using a RHEL 4, although it is planned to migrate to RHEL 5 next year. So we should still support 2.4 for at least 18 months, in case some big firms use RHEL and Python+Numpy for their tools. -- Information System Engineer, Ph.D. Website: http://matthieu-brucher.developpez.com/ Blogs: http://matt.eifelle.com and http://blog.developpez.com/?blog=92 LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/matthieubrucher