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

[Doug Hellmann]

On Apr 19, 2011, at 10:36 AM, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

> 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.

Victor, if you want to post the "call for support" to Python Insider, let me know off list and I will set you up with access.

Doug