increasing the python requirement

[Gordon Tyler]

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On 1/4/2011 7:30 PM, Andrew Bennetts wrote:
> What sort of bug fixes do you have in mind?  There are some bugs in the
> standard library that we have to work around, and having one less major
> version of the standard library to deal with would ease that burden a
> little.  e.g. the recent fix for HTTPS under Python 2.7 would probably
> have been easier and cleaner if we didn't need to support 2.4.  I don't
> think that is a particularly large cost though.

I don't know of any in particular, I was merely talking in the general
sense.

> The main thing I'm tempted by is context managers, but given that
> bzrlib.cleanup provides an adequate alternative that works under 2.4
> even that's not so important.

I haven't seen bzrlib.cleanup so I may be talking out of my ass here,
but `with` is probably a cleaner solution and there is a not
insignificant benefit to clean readable code. In other words, how much
cruft is there in the current source to satisfy python-2.4 requirements
that could be done in a cleaner fashion under python-2.5/2.6 and make it
much easier to understand and work with?

> I agree with Martin that these benefits don't seem to outweigh the
> enormous costs of backporting significant changes to a 2.4 compatible
> version.

Backporting is *nice* but is it *necessary*?

I'm mostly playing devil's advocate here to maybe trigger some
realization about assumptions that may have been made. I understand the
necessity of backwards-compatibility only too well having to maintain
JDK1.4-compatibility in my work projects (while eyeing all the nice
stuff in JDK1.6) due to irritating customers who insist on using
appservers that are *years* out of date. ;)

Ciao,
Gordon

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