Is it even wort doing a 2.7 release? Isn't the effort better spent on 3.2 alone? (Note, these aren't rhetorical questions. It's well possible that there are good reasons for pushing along with 2.7. Maybe considering those reasons will also help answering questions about whether to backport things like nonlocal.)
If no 2.7 is produced, people will ask for the life time of 2.6. I think users will appreciate not being forced to 3.x as long as possible, which essentially means as long as we create 2.x releases. It may be that users could also "live" with 2.6 bug fix releases only - in this case, we would have to decide for how long these will have to be created. There is also the issue of committers who already added stuff to the trunk after the 2.6 release - some may be unhappy to learn that their stuff is not going to be released (at least not on that branch). In the end, the EOL for 2.x will need to be decided by BDFL pronouncement. Users would continue to ask for 2.x releases until 2020 and beyond if all they have to do is ask. Some committers would likely also want to continue creating 2.x releases for a few more years (not sure whether that's because they see themselves also as users, or because they sympathize with the users, or for other reasons). In any case, a decision not to release 2.7 should be made before Benjamin produces the first alpha release. Regards, Martin