[python-committers] PyCon Language Summit: Wednesday 9th April

[David Malcolm]

On Wed, 2013-12-04 at 12:28 -0800, Eli Bendersky wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 11:47 AM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
>         On 04.12.2013 20:07, Benjamin Peterson wrote:
>         > 2013/12/4 Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org>:
>         >> On Dec 04, 2013, at 07:15 PM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
>         >>
>         >>> As for the question, I think we should wait at least two
>         or three years
>         >>> before "sunsetting" 2.7.
>         >>
>         >> I've been thinking we should move Python 2.7 to
>         security-fix only around the
>         >> Python 3.5 time frame, with a couple more years of promised
>         security support.
>         >
>         > FWIW, the current plan is to have the last normal release in
>         2015 and
>         > security releases "indefinitely" (2020 or something like
>         that).
>         
>         
>         Just as data point: we have customers that still request
>         Python 2.4
>         compatible versions of our products - simply because they
>         cannot
>         upgrade. The last release of that series was in 2008.
> 
> 
> I was always curious about these "cannot upgrade" cases. Most of the
> time, they seem to boil down to "because that's the default Python our
> RHEL comes with", completely ignoring the possiblity of just building
> a newer Python locally and/or carrying along with the product.

FWIW Red Hat also now has a RH-supported way of running more recent
versions of Python on RHEL:
http://developerblog.redhat.com/2013/09/12/rhscl1-ga/

though I believe that's only supported on RHEL6 onwards (giving 2.7 and
3.3. on RHEL6).

Doesn't help on RHEL 5 (which is still 2.4), though there are
(unsupported) srpms available for later releases there.