[Python-Dev] PEP 11: Dropping support for ten year old systems

[Seung Soo, Ha]

Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan <at> gmail.com> writes:

> On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 7:48 AM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin <at> v.loewis.de> 
wrote:
> > I'd like to tighten PEP 11
> > Opinions?
> 
> I would prefer to be guided by vendor EOL dates rather than our own
> arbitrary 10 year limit. The EOL guide I would suggest is "Is the
> vendor still fixing bugs in that release?".
> 
> Since the "Is the vendor still patching it?" guideline gives the
> "right" answer for the 3 systems mentioned in this thread, it will
> likely do a better job of covering anomalies like XP than a flat year
> limit would.
+1

I think Nick has a point.

If the vendor is willing to patch/support said version, then I think it would be 
worthwhile for the Python community to provide support 

EOL dates of prominent Linux distribution :

RHEL:
https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/
Ubuntu:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ubuntu_releases#Version_timeline
(http://www.ubuntu.com/products/ubuntu/release-cycle seems to be down)
SuSe
http://support.novell.com/lifecycle/

I do foresee a possible side-effect regarding Fedora as "maintained for 
approximately 13 months", because "Release X is supported until one 
month after the release of Release X+2."

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/LifeCycle

Considering the nature of the Fedora project, dropping unsupported fedora 
distributions may or may not be helpful for Pyhton and it's users.

Also, it is not clear what to do about distributions/OSs 
without any official EOL or life cycles.