[Python-Dev] Fwd: Anyone still using Python 2.5?

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 07:42:45AM -0500, Barry Warsaw wrote:
>FWIW, Ubuntu dropped 2.5 quite a while ago.  The next LTS (long term support)

That's true for *CURRENT* releases, however Ubuntu still supports Python
2.5 via 8.04 LTS (end of life in April 2013).  Lucid is 2.6 and goes EOL in
2015.

Red Hat Enterprise is a bit more difficult a situation.  They currently
still have active support for Python 2.3 in RHEL 4, but that comes up to
EOL in just a couple of months (Feb 2012).  But they have this "extended
life cycle" that ends in Feb 2015.

RHEL 5 has python 2.4.3 and has an EOL of April 2014 (April 2017 for
extended life cycle).

There was a fairly large lag between RHEL 5 and RHEL 6 (almost 4 years), so
there are a *LOT* of RHEL 5 systems out there.

RHEL 6 has Python 2.6.6, BTW.

This is why I recently released the "ineedpy2" package so that your program
can request and search for specific versions of Python on a multi-python
system.  We have a number of systems that have Python 2.3 and older on
them, but many of those systems have newer Pythons also available as
alternate names.

We recommend that whenever possible customers target deploying against the
system python, meaning version 2.4.3 if they are deploying on CentOS 5.
Because otherwise security updates of Python and *all the libraries they
depend on* need to be tracked manually.  Some customers decide to go one
route, some to go the other, but that is our recommendation.

Ideally, you are building your apps to target a production environment, not
just using the latest and greatest Python without compelling reasons.

So, yes, people are still using Python 2.5 and 2.4.  Mostly this is people
who have already deployed apps and are either fixing/updating them, or are
adding new applications that they want to target the same production
environment rather than setting up a new environment.

Sean
-- 
 Linux, because eventually you grow up enough to be trusted with a fork().
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability