How important is Python 1.5 compatibility?

[John J. Lee]

Erik Max Francis <max at alcyone.com> writes:

> How important do people think Python 1.5 compatibility is?  For some of
> my projects I've strived to keep it compatible with 1.5 (at least for
> the portions of the applications that actually would work with 1.5; for
> instance Unicode support obviously requires Python 2.x).  It seemed to
> me that this used to be fairly important, when, say, 2.1 was new, mostly
> because of other large Python applications that required 1.5, or lazy
> ISPs who still used older version.
[...]

Last time I checked (a month or so ago), the sourceforge web servers
were still running 1.5.2.  The SF *shell* servers were more
up-to-date, but not the web servers.

I take an "I've started so I'll finish" attitude to
1.5.2-compatibility with my open-source stuff.  With code where I
started out supporting 1.5.2 (um... badly, at least before I had
decent tests), I feel I may as well leave it that way.  (despite the
fact that I'd be surprised to learn that anybody actually runs my code
on 1.5.2)

With new open-source library code, in the absence of a need for some
major feature introduced later, I'd probably pick 2.2 now, because of
the big changes from 2.1 to 2.2.  I can see why you might choose 2.0,
2.1 or 2.3 instead, though.  All depends on the audience you hope to
reach, of course.


John