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

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Am 06.12.2010 05:36, schrieb Nick Coghlan:
> On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 7:48 AM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:
>> 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?
> 
> I would prefer to be guided by vendor EOL dates rather than our own
> arbitrary 10 year limit. The EOL guide I would suggest is "Is the
> vendor still fixing bugs in that release?".

If available, perhaps. Not all system vendors have such a policy,
or it may not be easy to find. If that is part of the policy, I'd
like to add the specific systems where we use this approach along
with the URLs that list the policies in the PEP.

As a counter-example, I think the only way to phase out support
for old OpenBSD releases is that we set a date.

If this policy is applied to Debian also, we may get unhappy users,
since Debian releases get out of love fairly quickly. OTOH, supporting
old Linux releases really isn't that much of a problem.

Regards,
Martin