On Mon, Nov 6, 2017 at 7:25 AM, Charles R Harris <charlesr.harris@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi All,

Thought I'd toss this out there. I'm tending towards better sooner than later in dropping Python 2.7 support as we are starting to run up against places where we would like to use Python 3 features. That is particularly true on Windows where the 2.7 compiler is really old and lacks C99 compatibility.

This is probably the most pressing reason to drop 2.7 support. We seem to be expending a lot of effort lately on this stuff. I was previously advocating being more conservative than the timeline you now propose, but this is the pain point that I think gets me over the line.

In any case, the timeline I've been playing with is to keep Python 2.7 support through 2018, which given our current pace, would be for NumPy 1.15 and 1.16. After that 1.16 would become a long term support release with backports of critical bug fixes up until the time that Python 2.7 support officially ends. In that timeline, NumPy 1.17 would drop support for 2.7.

And 3.4 at the same time or even earlier.

That proposed schedule is subject to change pending developments and feed back.

+1


The main task I think is needed before dropping 2.7 is better handling of unicode strings and bytes. There is the #4208 PR that makes a start on that.

Yep, at the very least we need one release that supports 2.7 *and* has fixed all the IO issues on 3.x

Ralf


If there are other things that folks think are essential, please mention them here. If nothing else, we can begin planning for the transition even if the schedule changes.

Chuck

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