On Sat, Oct 9, 2021 at 7:40 PM Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost> wrote:
>
>
> > Now that we've got Python 3.10, I think it's time to retire Python
> > 3.6. Many packages already dropped support for this version (like
> > Numpy). It's problematic when it comes to reading UTF-8 files.
>
> Regarding nia@'s point about Solaris 10, it would be nice for Solaris
> people to comment on why newer python can't reasonably be made to work
> by fixing either Python or Solaris. Maybe this really is intractable,
> but that would seem somewhat surprising. Agree that the presence of 3.6
> is not causing that much, if any, trouble, and that accomodating people
> is nice if it doesn't hurt.
There is a reason why we support PYTHON_VERSIONS_ACCEPTED and
PYTHON_VERSIONS_INCOMPATIBLE
> > We've got Python 3.9 as a default. Maybe we should go one step further
> > and retire Python 3.7 as well?
>
> Even if we drop 3.6, my reaction is that 3.7 isn't super old and it
> feels fast to drop it.
Note that upstream will support 3.6 until 2021-12. Perhaps target 22Q1
release for removal to align with this.
Upstream EOL for PY37 is 2023-06.
> It would be interesting to a bulk build or a few, identifying the count
> of packages that do and don't build with 3.8. Other than 3.8 not
> running on some platform, I wonder how much there really are good
> reasons to run 3.6 or 3.7 instead of 3.8, other than not having updated
> yet.
Mostly change control prioritization (coordination/testing/validation
requirements) for folks in production environments that have a bunch
of abi-dependent pkgsrc python packages (numpy, psycopg2, etc.).