So, what's the real story on Python 2 vs Python 3?

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Dec 27, 2013 at 10:34 PM, Steven D'Aprano
<steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
> Alternatively, if you don't care about the OS-provided Python (perhaps
> you're providing your own, or you expect your users to install from
> source), then I think it is acceptable to target 2.7 and 3.3 or better
> (e.g. drop support for 3.1 and 3.2). 3.0 is not supported at all -- it was
> a buggy release and was quickly dropped for 3.1. If you're not constrained
> by "yum python3" or "apt-get python3", then 3.3 is probably the version you
> should aim for.

That's about the size of it. I'm quite happy to work with a 3.4 alpha,
but when it comes to installation instructions, "get this and compile
it" is a lot less helpful than "install python3 via your OS package
manager" (especially since compiling Python from source also means
getting the development versions of whatever modules you need -
apt-getting a bunch of -dev packages, or whatever - and if you don't
get them, some modules mightn't work even though core Python does).
Hence I'd like to stick to OS-provided versions *where reasonable* -
I'm not going to warp my code around Python 2.4 unless there's a large
slab of users on that, but I will restrict myself to Pike 7.8.700
because it's worth the effort.

ChrisA