[Python-Dev] Fwd: Anyone still using Python 2.5? (original) (raw)

Toshio Kuratomi a.badger at gmail.com
Thu Dec 22 06:17:32 CET 2011

On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 02:49:06AM +0100, Victor Stinner wrote:

>Do people still have to use this in commercial environments or is >everyone on 2.6+ nowadays? At work, we are still using Python 2.5. Six months ago, we started a project to upgrade to 2.7, but we have now more urgent tasks, so the upgrade is delayed to later. Even if we upgrade new clients to 2.7, we will have to continue to support 2.5 for some more months (or years?). At my work, I'm on RHEL5 and RHEL6. So I'm currently supporting python-2.4 and python-2.6. We're up to 75% RHEL6 (though, not the machines where most of our deployed, custom written apps are running) so I shouldn't have to support python-2.4 for much longer.

In a personal project (the IPy library), I dropped support of Python 2.5 in february 2011. Recently, I got a mail asking me where the previous version of my library (supporting Python 2.4) can be downloaded! Someone is still using Python 2.4: "I'm stuck with python 2.4 in my work environment." As part of work, I package for EPEL5 (addon packages for RHEL5). Sometimes we need a new version of a package or a new package for RHEL5 and thus need to have python-2.4 compatible versions of the package and any of its dependencies.

When I no longer need to maintain python-2.4 stuff for work, I'm hoping to not have to do quite so much of this but sometimes I know I'll still get requests to update an existing package to fix a bug or fix a feature and that will require updates of dependent libraries. I'll still be stuck looking for python-2.4 compatible versions of all of these :-(

>What do people feel?

For a new project, try to support Python 2.5, especially if you would like to write a portable library. For a new application working on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux, you can only support Python 2.6. I agree that libraries have a need to go farther back than applications. I have one library that I support on python-2.3 (for RHEL4... I'm counting down the months on that one :-). Every other library I maintain, I make sure I support at least python-2.4.

Application-wise, I currently have to support python-2.4+ but given that Linux distros seem to all have some version out that supports at least python-2.6, I don't think I'll be developing any applications that intentionally support less than that once I get moved away from RHEL-5 at my workplace.

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