increasing the python requirement (was Re: [rfc] upgrade pqm chroot to lucid)

[Jelmer Vernooij]

On Tue, 2011-01-04 at 10:16 -0600, John Arbash Meinel wrote:
> On 1/4/2011 9:20 AM, Max Bowsher wrote:
> > On 04/01/11 14:51, Aaron Bentley wrote:
> >> On 11-01-04 05:33 AM, Martin Pool wrote:
> >>> From memory 2.6 has relatively more relevant new features we'd like to
> >>> use than 2.5 does, so there is an incentive to bump our requirement
> >>> all the way to 2.6.
> >>
> >> I've found context managers and the 'with' statement, (available via
> >> __future__ in 2.5), are really significant in day-to-day programming.
> >> Managing scopes via try/finally has always been a pain.
> >>
> >> But don't let me stop you going to 2.6
> > 
> > Going all the way to 2.6 would be de-supporting Ubunty hardy and Debian
> > etch (oldstable).
> > 
> > Granted, they're pretty old, but there's no doubt a large installed base
> > of such systems still.
> > 
> > I think we could probably get away with de-supporting them now, but we
> > should only do it if we have a really really good reason.
> Note that it isn't like we are completely leaving them out in the cold.
> We'll still be doing bzr 2.3 minor updates for quite a while
> (6-18months). Given that we are EoLife-ing bzr 2.0, which IIRC is what
> those platforms came with by default.
> 
> It seems reasonable that when we stop supporting the original version,
> we can stop supporting the python version (it is old enough now, etc.)
> 
> Just a thought.
+1

etch will hopefully be oldoldstable by the time bzr 2.4 is released.

Debian lenny (current stable) only has Python 2.5, so it'd be great if
bzr 2.4 could at least still support Python 2.5.

RHEL 6 has also just been released. Hopefully it will be in much wider
use by the time Bazaar 2.4 is released (RHEL 5 has python 2.4).

If bzr 2.4 introduced any format changes then not supporting Python 2.4
would be a much bigger deal IMO, because users would have to upgrade to
2.4 to interact with repositories in the newer format. 

Cheers,

Jelmer