Since we have plural support for i18n py2.4 is deprecated and does not fully support it except in a default way regarding to bug #3433609. Pre 2.5 releases cannot use plural.py and IMHO we shouldn't downgrade it (look at the code for the reason why). Maybe there is only this guy who is using that old stuff. I guess we should move a copy of the current 2.4 compatible release to the archive without further updates (and maybe make it available at pywikipedia nightly for downloading).
2.6 should be the new minimum version. But we have the unicode bug with all releases from 2.5 upto 2.7.1. This means 2.7.2 is the release which is strongly recommended I think.
Regards
xqt
2012/2/26 Merlijn van Deen
<valhallasw@arctus.nl>
I think the main problem lies with RHEL and CentOS, both of which still ship Python 2.4. However, people running these OS'es are probably also smart enough to be able to do a manual python build.
I hope so. :-) And what do those guys at Red Hat think about Python?
As far as I am concerned, we should maybe even bump the minimum version to 2.6, which is the version the current debian stable uses. 2.5 was released in august 2006 (!), 2.6 in october 2008.
Strong support, I just was not brave enough to propose that directly. 2.6 is the first version with Python 3000 features backported, and it is very close to 2.7 which may hope a longer support time. It may be a base to write code as close to 3.x syntax as possible.
As for a date: I suggest something a few months in the future, say july or august. This gives people some time to update.
That's OK, I suggested 2 month for deciding the further steps, not to deprecate 2.4 immediately.
Last but not least: not supported does not necessarily mean we have to actively remove bits that work around quirks for a certain version; rather, it means we won't fix bugs due to an old python version.
I would be more radical. What I would like to see is a cleaner code without unneccessary branches, and free use of some basic tools such as conditional (x if cond. else y) that is widely used in the world of programming. But let's see the survey first.