Breaking python2.4 compatibility for bzr-2.4

[Martin Pool]

Do you have any positive reason to keep 2.4 compatibility on trunk, or
is it just that you don't see a sufficient reason to drop it.

On 21 April 2011 10:31, Martin (gzlist) <gzlist at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> 5) If we go all the way to python2.6 compatibility we can start looking
>>    at doing things to support Python 3.
>>    (This is my recommendation, since RHEL6 has python2.6, and I don't
>>    think anything else is strictly blocked for python2.5)
>
> Is there anyone who actually wants to work on this though? I note the
> last release of testtools was broken on Python 3 again and wasn't
> noticed. There's a lot to do in the codebase as it stands over bytes
> vs. unicode before getting on to worrying about whether print need
> parentheses.

I hear really mixed messages about when distributions may start
switching to 3.0 by default: in Ubuntu, people have floated the idea
of dropping 2.x support as early as Oneiric (late this year) and as
late as never.  If that crystallizes into an actual deadline then
people will start working on it.  Before that, it is just personal
interest, or waiting for py3 to provide some really compelling
benefit.

I think it's still an open question whether dropping 2.4 will help
with going to python3.  As I said in the earlier thread, if someone
comes up with a patch that moves bzr (or even some nontrivial subset)
to py3 compatibility, and they say that they found it too hard to do
this without using py2.6 features, that would be a compelling reason
to drop 2.4.  Some people on the web have said they found this to be
the case in other projects, but other people say the opposite, so I
don't put a lot of weight on it.

-- 
Martin