[Python-Dev] PEP 11: Dropping support for ten year old systems (original) (raw)

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Mon Dec 6 00:45:02 CET 2010

On 12/5/2010 4:48 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" wrote:

I'd like to tighten PEP 11, and declare a policy that systems older than ten years at the point of a feature release are not supported anymore by default. Older systems where support is still maintained need to be explicitly listed in the PEP, along with the name of the responsible maintainer (I think this would currently only cover OS2/EMX which is maintained by Andrew MacIntyre).

Support for such old platforms can then be removed from the codebase immediately, no need to go through a PEP 11 deprecation cycle. As a consequence, I would then like to remove support for Solaris versions older than Solaris 8 (released in January 2000, last updated by Sun in 2004) from the configure script for 3.2b2. A number of other tests in configure.in could probably also be removed, although I personally won't touch them before 3.2. The other major system affected by this would be Windows 2000, for which we already decided to not support it anymore.

WinXP (released August 2001) should be supported a lot longer than another year ;-) . It is still supported and installed on new systems.

-- Terry Jan Reedy

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