On Wed, 2011-12-21 at 10:42 +0100, Charles-François Natali wrote:

...

Do people still have to use this in commercial environments or is everyone on 2.6+ nowadays?

RHEL 5.7 ships with Python 2.4.3. So no, not everybody is on 2.6+ today, and this won't happen before a couple years.

(and RHEL 4.9 with Python 2.3.4, fwiw)

I am still working on projects based on Python2.4 in commercial environments (limitation of OS: Solaris 5.10). And I don't think this will be changed soon.. 2011/12/21 Michael Foord

On 21 Dec 2011, at 12:42, Barry Warsaw wrote:

...

On Dec 21, 2011, at 07:16 AM, Chris Withers wrote:

...

What's the general consensus on supporting Python 2.5 nowadays?

FWIW, Ubuntu dropped 2.5 quite a while ago. The next LTS (long term support) release in April 2012 will have only Python 2.7 (and 3.2). The currently in-development next Debian release currently has only Python 2.6, 2.7, and 3.2 with 2.7 as the default.

For my own code, Python 2.6 is the minimum, and I'm seeing more upstream libraries target 2.6 as a minimum also (e.g. dbus-python). When projects say they still need to target older Pythons, RHEL support is usually cited as the reason.

For "production work" I've been on 2.6 for a while and will soon be switching to 2.7 (I do my development on 2.7).

For my libraries I'm still supporting 2.4. The *major* syntax feature you lose by targeting 2.4 is the with statement, so it will be nice to drop 2.4 support. The next releases of mock and unittest2 will still support 2.4, but the ones after that will be 2.5+.

Thankfully tox makes testing across multiple versions (and implementations) easy.

All the best,

Michael Foord

...

Cheers, -Barry _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe:

http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/fuzzyman%40voidspace.org.u...

...

-- http://www.voidspace.org.uk/

May you do good and not evil May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others May you share freely, never taking more than you give. -- the sqlite blessing http://www.sqlite.org/different.html

_______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/jwzxgo%40gmail.com

On Wed, 2011-12-21 at 07:42 -0500, Barry Warsaw wrote:

On Dec 21, 2011, at 07:16 AM, Chris Withers wrote:

...

What's the general consensus on supporting Python 2.5 nowadays?

FWIW, Ubuntu dropped 2.5 quite a while ago.

Some servers I deploy to run Ubuntu, but we're installing previous python versions to support our apps - OS support isn't a factor in which version we develop for. I work on applications in 2.4-2.6. Generally: 2.4 apps are legacy and a migration is planned in the next year (either to 2.7 or to pypy). 2.5 apps are the speed-critical ones. Our tests showed the performance was different enough between 2.5 and 2.6 for me to not update. They also have significant native extensions in them so are potentially the most difficult to port to python3. 2.6 apps are newish and (mainly) pure python. I can see myself still using 2.5 for many years, but porting the 2.6 and 2.4 code to either pypy or python3 in the not too distant future. I believe we're most likely to choose python3 for apps with heavy use of Unicode (and pick a version after the changes to internal unicode format landed). Tim Wintle

On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 11:56 AM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:

On Thu, 22 Dec 2011 09:44:32 +0000 Tim Wintle wrote:

...

2.5 apps are the speed-critical ones. Our tests showed the performance was different enough between 2.5 and 2.6 for me to not update.

Really? Where's the regression?

Regards

Antoine.

Sounds weird, for all I know 2.6 is faster or not slower than 2.5.

On Thu, 2011-12-22 at 10:56 +0100, Antoine Pitrou wrote:

On Thu, 22 Dec 2011 09:44:32 +0000 Tim Wintle wrote:

...

2.5 apps are the speed-critical ones. Our tests showed the performance was different enough between 2.5 and 2.6 for me to not update.

Really? Where's the regression?

I'm not certain - IIRC there were several nice optimisations in 2.6, and I wasn't expecting that when I first looked. I was running code designed for 2.5 under 2.6, so it's likely that with sufficient tweaking for 2.6 I might not have the same result. I tested this specific code with the python builds we have in production, not general python code - I don't mean this as a recommendation that anyone else assume 2.5 is faster for them. I suspect that Stefan's comments about newly added features without the optimisation in python3 might be partially true, but having the extra code to support them (while not using them) might also be part of the cause - ceval.c had over 1K line changes between r25 and r26, including cases for new opcodes, and new opcode predictions etc - it's possible that my code just happens to not follow the most optimal paths. I'm talking about a slow-down of under 10%, but enough that I couldn't justify moving these apps to 2.6 at the time for economic reasons, and pypy would be the main incentive to move this to 2.7. Tim

On 21/12/2011 15:26, anatoly techtonik wrote:

I believe most AppEngine applications in Python are still using 2.5 run-time. So are development boxes for these applications. It may take another year or two for the transition.

App engine 1.6 improved support of Python 2.7, so I hope that -slowly- everybody will move to Python 3. Oops, I mean Python 2.7 ;-) http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/python27/ Victor

On Thu, 22 Dec 2011 01:49:37 +0000 Michael Foord wrote:

These figures can't possibly be true. No-one is using Python 3 yet. ;-)

Since you brought it up. Is anyone paying people (or trying to hire people) to write Python 3? Thanks, http://www.mired.org/ Independent Software developer/SCM consultant, email for more information. O< ascii ribbon campaign - stop html mail - www.asciiribbon.org

On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 4:49 AM, Michael Foord wrote:

On 22 Dec 2011, at 01:25, Mark Hammond wrote:

...

FWIW, the most recent version of pywin32 has the following download counts (rounded to the nearest thousand)

Version 32bit 64bit ------------------------- 3.2 - 75,000 9,000 3.1 - 4,000 1,000 2.7 - 126,000 16,000 2.6 - 46,000 6,000 2.5 - 21,000 n/a 2.4 - 3,000 n/a 2.3 - 1,000 n/a

So ISTM that 2.5 isn't hugely popular these days, but also isn't insignificant. It probably means I could "safely" drop 2.3 and 2.4 support though...

These figures can't possibly be true. No-one is using Python 3 yet. ;-)

python.org should have a poll/settings for active python.org accounts to allow people mark when they switch to Python 3. FWIW I heard a few days ago about a UK government department, HMGCC (Her

Majesty's Government Communication Centre - based in Milton Keynes), who use Python for research projects. They switched to using Python 3 a while ago.

if that == True: front_page.response(news_template.render("News About Her Majesty switched to Python 3")) Can't stand to do a +1 for the news item. All the best,

Michael Foord

On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 02:49:06AM +0100, Victor Stinner wrote:

...

Do people still have to use this in commercial environments or is everyone on 2.6+ nowadays?

At work, we are still using Python 2.5. Six months ago, we started a project to upgrade to 2.7, but we have now more urgent tasks, so the upgrade is delayed to later. Even if we upgrade new clients to 2.7, we will have to continue to support 2.5 for some more months (or years?).

At my work, I'm on RHEL5 and RHEL6. So I'm currently supporting python-2.4 and python-2.6. We're up to 75% RHEL6 (though, not the machines where most of our deployed, custom written apps are running) so I shouldn't have to support python-2.4 for much longer.

In a personal project (the IPy library), I dropped support of Python 2.5 in february 2011. Recently, I got a mail asking me where the previous version of my library (supporting Python 2.4) can be downloaded! Someone is still using Python 2.4: "I'm stuck with python 2.4 in my work environment."

As part of work, I package for EPEL5 (addon packages for RHEL5). Sometimes we need a new version of a package or a new package for RHEL5 and thus need to have python-2.4 compatible versions of the package and any of its dependencies. When I no longer need to maintain python-2.4 stuff for work, I'm hoping to not have to do quite so much of this but sometimes I know I'll still get requests to update an existing package to fix a bug or fix a feature and that will require updates of dependent libraries. I'll still be stuck looking for python-2.4 compatible versions of all of these :-(

...

What do people feel?

For a new project, try to support Python 2.5, especially if you would like to write a portable library. For a new application working on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux, you can only support Python 2.6.

I agree that libraries have a need to go farther back than applications. I have one library that I support on python-2.3 (for RHEL4... I'm counting down the months on that one :-). Every other library I maintain, I make sure I support at least python-2.4. Application-wise, I currently have to support python-2.4+ but given that Linux distros seem to all have some version out that supports at least python-2.6, I don't think I'll be developing any applications that intentionally support less than that once I get moved away from RHEL-5 at my workplace. -Toshio