[Cython] Should we drop support for CPython 2.3? (and maybe even 2.4?)

[Stefan Behnel]

Hi,

quick question before raising a poll on the users mailing list.

Would anyone mind dropping support for CPython 2.3?

1) it's long out of maintenance, even the last security release dates back 
to early 2008

2) there have been seven main releases of CPython since then, four of which 
were in the 2.x line, starting with 2.4 in late 2004 - even 2.5 was 
released five years ago

3) it produces weird and annoying errors in Jenkins, or rather none at all 
most of the time, since the test suite does not run the doctests on 2.3 anyway

4) the new code that was written by Vitja and Mark would be (or would have 
been) cleaner with decorators and other 'recent' Python features

There are two sides to this: dropping support for running Cython in 2.3 and 
dropping support for compiling the generated code in 2.3. The first is the 
more interesting one. It's not strictly required to do both, we could 
continue to support it at the C level, but given how badly tested Cython is 
on that version anyway, I think stating that the generated code is 2.3 
compatible is already hand waving today. So we may even just let the C code 
support fade out silently until someone actually notices.

Actually, even 2.4 is a candidate for dropping support for running Cython 
on it. The last release dates back to December 2008, and its lack of 64 bit 
support makes it severly less attractive than even 2.5, which is also going 
out of security-fix maintenance now.

Comments?

Stefan