[Python-Dev] Tru64 support

[martin at v.loewis.de]

Zitat von Larry Hastings <larry at hastings.org>:

> On 09/04/2012 03:15 PM, martin at v.loewis.de wrote:
>> The world wouldn't end if the test broke on Tru64, though.
>
> FWIW, HP drops support for Tru64 at the end of this year:
>
>    http://h30097.www3.hp.com/tru64roadmap.pdf
>
>
> Of course, this doesn't directly imply Python should stop supporting  
> it--IIRC Python's OS/2 support outlasted IBM's support by many years.

It's perfectly fine (IMO) to drop support for Tru64. The main point of
PEP 11 is that this shouldn't be done ad-hoc, but by giving users advance
notice. So dropping support between bug fix releases is not ok
(but unknowingly breaking test cases for some platform where we don't
have a buildbot is ok, of course - whether the platform is little
used or not).

It's unfortunate that the presumed removal of Tru64 support in 3.0
didn't get recorded in PEP 11 (which may well be my fault as well);
it's also unfortunate that it wasn't carried out completely, so that
it's now not clear whether it was carried out at all. If 3.0 wouldn't
have worked at all on Tru64 already, removing the remains would
be a bug fix. If the removal was only documented but not implemented,
support wasn't actually removed, so users may not have received
the advance warning that configure should have spit out, in which
case removal in 3.4 may appear ad-hoc to them.

In any case, it appears that nobody ever announced removal of Tru64
support for 2.x, which means that it continues to be supported -
except that it may not actually work. But if so, we should accept
bug fixes that claim to restore support.

Regards,
Martin