[Numpy-discussion] Proposal of timeline for dropping Python 2.7 support

[Matthew Brett]

Hi,

On Wed, Nov 8, 2017 at 7:08 PM, Julian Taylor
<jtaylor.debian at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 06.11.2017 11:10, Ralf Gommers wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Nov 6, 2017 at 7:25 AM, Charles R Harris
>> <charlesr.harris at gmail.com <mailto:charlesr.harris at 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.
>
>
> Would dropping python2 support for windows earlier than the other
> platforms a reasonable approach?
> I am not a big fan of to dropping python2 support before 2020, but I
> have no issue with dropping python2 support on windows earlier as it is
> our largest pain point.

I wonder about this too.  I can imagine there are a reasonable number
of people using older Linux distributions on which they cannot upgrade
to a recent Python 3, but is that likely to be true for Windows?

We'd have to make sure we could persuade pypi to give the older
version for Windows, by default - I don't know if that is possible.

Cheers,

Matthew