[Python-Dev] PEP 11: Dropping support for ten year old systems

["Martin v. Löwis"]

I'd like to tighten PEP 11, and declare a policy that systems
older than ten years at the point of a feature release are not
supported anymore by default. Older systems where support is still
maintained need to be explicitly listed in the PEP, along with
the name of the responsible maintainer (I think this would currently
only cover OS2/EMX which is maintained by Andrew MacIntyre).

Support for such old platforms can then be removed from the codebase
immediately, no need to go through a PEP 11 deprecation cycle.

As a consequence, I would then like to remove support for Solaris
versions older than Solaris 8 (released in January 2000, last updated
by Sun in 2004) from the configure script for 3.2b2. A number of other
tests in configure.in could probably also be removed, although I
personally won't touch them before 3.2.

The other major system affected by this would be Windows 2000, for which
we already decided to not support it anymore.

Opinions?

Regards,
Martin