[Python-Dev] Should we drop active support of OSF/1? (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Mon May 3 21:55:42 CEST 2010

Jesus Cea wrote:

On 26/04/10 22:00, "Martin v. Löwis" wrote:

Maybe we can drop OSF/1 safely supporting Tru64 yet, but we don't have any buildbot running any of this systems... Dropping support is fine with me, in the long term. If PEP 11 is truly followed, we should deprecate support in one version, and drop it in the next one. This would mean we add a easy-to-remove configure error in 3.2, and remove the support in 3.3. Would be enough to raise an "ERROR" at configure time if OSF test is positive?. To delete that intentional "ERROR" would be trivial.

That's actually what the PEP suggests (or means to suggest). Users willing to take over maintenance would, at a minimum, know how to remove that error. If a user doesn't know how to remove it, they can ask for help, but more importantly, they probably consider it already unsupported - which is exactly the desired effect.

Just to rephrase: the point of this deprecation cycle is to give users a chance to take over maintenance, and to declare, in public, that they are interested in that port. If nobody steps forward, we can safely assume that nobody cares.

Regards, Martin

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