[Python-Dev] Drop OS/2 and VMS support?

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Victor Stinner wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I asked one year ago if we should drop OS/2 support: Andrew MacIntyre,
> our OS/2 maintainer, answered:
> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2010-April/099477.html
> 
> Extract: << The 3.x branch needs quite a bit of work on OS/2 to 
> deal with Unicode, as OS/2 was one of the earlier OSes with full 
> multiple language support and IBM developed a unique API.  I'm still 
> struggling to come to terms with this, partly because I myself don't 
> "need" it. >>
> 
> So one year later, Python 3 does still not support OS/2.
> 
> --
> 
> About VMS: I don't know if anyone is using Python (2 or 3) on VMS, or if
> Python 3 does work on VMS. I bet that it does just not compile :-)
> 
> I don't know anyone using VMS or OS/2.
> 
> --
> 
> There are 39 #ifdef VMS and 52 #ifdef OS2. We can keep them and wait
> until someone work on these OSes to ensure that the test suite pass. But
> if nobody cares of these OSes and nobody wants to maintain them, it
> would be easier for the maintenance of the Python source code base to
> remove specific code.
> 
> Well, not "remove" directly, but plan to remove it using the PEP 11
> procedure (mark OS/2 and VMS as unsupported, and remove the code in
> Python 3.4).

The Python core team is not really representative of the Python
community users, so I think this needs a different approach:

Instead of simply deprecating OSes without notice to the general
Python community, how about doing a "call for support" for these
OSes ?

If that doesn't turn up maintainers, then we can take the PEP 11
route.

FWIW: There's still a fan-base out there for OS/2 and its successor
eComStation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EComStation
http://www.ecomstation.com/ecomstation20.phtml
http://www.warpstock.eu/

Same for VMS in form of OpenVMS:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/index.html?jumpid=/go/openvms
http://www.vmspython.org/

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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