Anyone still using Python 2.5?

[Chris Withers]

Hi All,

What's the general consensus on supporting Python 2.5 nowadays?

Do people still have to use this in commercial environments or is
everyone on 2.6+ nowadays?

I'm finally getting some continuous integration set up for my packages
and it's highlighting some 2.5 compatibility issues. I'm wondering
whether to fix those (lots of ugly "from __future__ import
with_statement" everywhere) or just to drop Python 2.5 support.

What do people feel?

cheers,

Chris

--
Simplistix - Content Management, Batch Processing & Python Consulting
- http://www.simplistix.co.uk

[Stefan Behnel]

Chris Withers, 21.12.2011 08:15:

> What's the general consensus on supporting Python 2.5 nowadays?

From my own (recent) polls, it appears that people want continued support
for Python 2.4 and later for a couple of years to come, mainly because
RHEL5 uses that by default and has official support until 2014. Similar
considerations apply to many Solaris installations.

The general consensus seems to be that support for Python 2.3 can easily be
dropped, but that support for Py2.4 and later would be helpful.

Stefan

[Pierre-Yves David]

On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 07:15:46AM +0000, Chris Withers wrote:
> Hi All,

>
> What's the general consensus on supporting Python 2.5 nowadays?
>

> Do people still have to use this in commercial environments or is
> everyone on 2.6+ nowadays?
>
> I'm finally getting some continuous integration set up for my
> packages and it's highlighting some 2.5 compatibility issues. I'm
> wondering whether to fix those (lots of ugly "from __future__ import
> with_statement" everywhere) or just to drop Python 2.5 support.
>
> What do people feel?

Most linux distribution went directly from 2.4 to 2.5

Debian:
old stable (lenny) 2.4
stable (squeeze) 2.5

Red Hat
REHL5 2.4
REHL6 2.6

The most notable exception is Ubuntu Hardy and LTS release from april 2008 with
2.5. But this LTS is out of support for almost 1 year now and current LTS
(Lucid) ship 2.6.


If you don't plan to support 2.4, supporting 2.5 does not seems a priority.


--
Pierre-Yves David

http://www.logilab.fr/

[Staple, Daniel (BSKYB)]

We've a bunch of windows servers stuck on python 2.5 since an API we use on them is shipped to us pyc's only - forcing us to stay with that version. Most of our other machines are on 2.6 or 2.7.

-----Original Message-----
From: testing-in-p...@lists.idyll.org [mailto:testing-in-p...@lists.idyll.org] On Behalf Of Chris Withers
Sent: 21 December 2011 07:16
To: Python List; testing-...@lists.idyll.org; simpl...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [TIP] Anyone still using Python 2.5?

Hi All,

What's the general consensus on supporting Python 2.5 nowadays?

Do people still have to use this in commercial environments or is everyone on 2.6+ nowadays?

I'm finally getting some continuous integration set up for my packages and it's highlighting some 2.5 compatibility issues. I'm wondering whether to fix those (lots of ugly "from __future__ import with_statement" everywhere) or just to drop Python 2.5 support.

What do people feel?

cheers,

Chris

--
Simplistix - Content Management, Batch Processing & Python Consulting
- http://www.simplistix.co.uk

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[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wed, 21 Dec 2011 07:15:46 +0000, Chris Withers wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> What's the general consensus on supporting Python 2.5 nowadays?
>
> Do people still have to use this in commercial environments or is
> everyone on 2.6+ nowadays?

Centos and Red Hat production systems still use Python 2.4, so yes,
absolutely, 2.5 and 2.4 still need to be supported.

Not necessarily by package authors though -- that's a matter for them to
decide. I'm presently writing a small library which will support 2.4
through 3.2, which isn't as hard as it sounds like, but still isn't
exactly fun. If the project were much bigger, I'd drop support for 2.4
and only support 2.5. At least then I could use conditional expressions
and __future__ imports.

> I'm finally getting some continuous integration set up for my packages
> and it's highlighting some 2.5 compatibility issues. I'm wondering
> whether to fix those (lots of ugly "from __future__ import
> with_statement" everywhere) or just to drop Python 2.5 support.
>
> What do people feel?

It really depends on *your* users, not arbitrary developers. How many of
your users are using 2.5?



--
Steven

[Jonathan Lange]

On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 9:21 AM, Pierre-Yves David
<pierre-y...@logilab.fr> wrote:
...

> The most notable exception is Ubuntu Hardy and LTS release from april 2008 with
> 2.5. But this LTS is out of support for almost 1 year now and current LTS
> (Lucid) ship 2.6.

Not quite. Ubuntu 8.04 LTS is supported on the server until April 2013.

jml

[Jim Fulton]

On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 2:15 AM, Chris Withers <ch...@simplistix.co.uk> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> What's the general consensus on supporting Python 2.5 nowadays?
>
> Do people still have to use this in commercial environments or is everyone
> on 2.6+ nowadays?
>

> I'm finally getting some continuous integration set up for my packages and
> it's highlighting some 2.5 compatibility issues. I'm wondering whether to
> fix those (lots of ugly "from __future__ import with_statement" everywhere)
> or just to drop Python 2.5 support.
>
> What do people feel?

Google app engine is still Python 2.5, as is Jython.

Jim

--
Jim Fulton
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jimfulton

[George R. C. Silva]

Em quarta-feira, 21 de dezembro de 2011 08:50:34, Steven D'Aprano
escreveu:

There are still people on 2.5. ESRIs customers (www.esri.com) that rely
heavily on Python 2.5, because it ships with a popular ArcGIS release
(9.31). The new ArcGIS release uses 2.6, but I can see 9.31 lurking
around for another year, at least.

Cheers.

[Roy Smith]

In article <4ef1b9fa$0$29973$c3e8da3$5496...@news.astraweb.com>,

Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp....@pearwood.info> wrote:

> Centos and Red Hat production systems still use Python 2.4, so yes,
> absolutely, 2.5 and 2.4 still need to be supported.

Is Python 2.4 destined to be the next IE-6?

[Tom Davis]

On Dec 21, 2011, at 2:15 AM, Chris Withers <ch...@simplistix.co.uk> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> What's the general consensus on supporting Python 2.5 nowadays?
>
> Do people still have to use this in commercial environments or is everyone on 2.6+ nowadays?

For those of us living the nightmare of AppEngine *and* working on an app old enough to not be using the newer Datastore, we're stuck on 2.5 until we can justify a data migration. Frankly I don't know how many such apps exist these days that are still actively developed, though.

>
> I'm finally getting some continuous integration set up for my packages and it's highlighting some 2.5 compatibility issues. I'm wondering whether to fix those (lots of ugly "from __future__ import with_statement" everywhere) or just to drop Python 2.5 support.
>
> What do people feel?
>

[Roy Smith]

In article <mailman.3913.1324474...@python.org>,

Tom Davis <t...@recursivedream.com> wrote:

> For those of us living the nightmare of AppEngine

I've never used AppEngine, just read a little about it. Could you
explain why it's a nightmare?

[Tim Chase]

No...unlike IE6, 2.4 backwards compatibility has a foreseeable
death when RHEL+2.6 eventually fall out of support ;-)

-tkc

[Chris.W...@cwi.nl]

On 2011-12-21T07:15:46+0000, Chris Withers wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> What's the general consensus on supporting Python 2.5 nowadays?
>
> Do people still have to use this in commercial environments or is
> everyone on 2.6+ nowadays?

2.5, how modern.
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 comes with 2.4.2

Will be moving to a RHEL derivative running 2.6, though.

The conservative enterprise will probably run py3k by y3k. :-(

--
Chris

[Nathan Rice]

Just because the default python version on a server is 2.4 doesn't
mean you can't install 2.7.2... If the admins that run the machine are
too lazy/stupid to install a second copy of Python let them rot.

Of course, if by some nightmare scenario you have code that can't be
upgraded for whatever reason, I'm so sorry.

Nathan

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wed, 21 Dec 2011 21:15:31 -0500, Nathan Rice wrote:

> Just because the default python version on a server is 2.4 doesn't mean
> you can't install 2.7.2... If the admins that run the machine are too
> lazy/stupid to install a second copy of Python let them rot.

If any of my sys admins installed non-supported software on one of my
production servers without permission, they'd be looking for a new job.

Just because some guy with root privileges can install software doesn't
mean that he should.

Having vendor support and security patches is far more important than the
ability to write one-liner if statements.



--
Steven

[Stefan Behnel]

Dennis Lee Bieber, 21.12.2011 17:48:

> On Wed, 21 Dec 2011 07:15:46 +0000, Chris Withers wrote:

>> What's the general consensus on supporting Python 2.5 nowadays?
>>
>> Do people still have to use this in commercial environments or is
>> everyone on 2.6+ nowadays?
>

> I was recently laid-off from a program that is still using Python 2.3 [...]

That reminds me: we shouldn't forget about embedded Python installations.
They are usually somewhere between "very hard" and "impossible" to upgrade,
also because they often use vendor supplied binary packages for plugin
APIs. I've recently seen that in a FrontArena installation (basically a
trading platform) that had an embedded Py2.3 for scripting. It wasn't
exactly the cutting-edge release, but the users of these platforms tend to
be pretty conservative with their upgrades, and the time it takes the
vendor to upgrade to a new embedded Python version can be similarly long.
That means it can take several years before an embedded 2.7 hits the end
users, during which anything can happen, from "vendor switches from Python
to Lua" to "vendor goes bankrupt" (or maybe just one after the other).

Stefan