[Python-Dev] Drop OS/2 and VMS support? (original) (raw)

M.-A. Lemburg mal at egenix.com
Tue Apr 19 21:51:34 CEST 2011

Doug Hellmann wrote:

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.

I can help with that if you like.

-- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com

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