Python 3.4.1 on W2K?

[Tim Golden]

On 06/10/2014 01:04, Pal Acreide wrote:
> Hi, I'm a lurker here and enjoy the back-and-forth, especially among the
> experts among you.
> 
> My question is this: I have Python 3.4.1 installed on 64-bit Win 7 Home
> Premium, and on 32-bit Win 7 Pro  running on a virtual machine (Oracle
> VirtualBox). Now I'm trying to install it on Windows 2000 Pro also
> running under VBox. However, at some point near the end of the Python
> installation I get an error message to the effect that a program
> required for Win Installer is missing and the installation aborts. I'm
> running W2K SP4 + (undocumented) SP5.1.
> 
> I guess it comes down to: Can Python 3.4.1 be installed on W2K?

I'm afraid we formally dropped support for Win 2000 at least one version
ago. You can see the official schedule here:

http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0011/#unsupporting-platforms

and you'll note that Win2K was unsupported from 3.3.

In the first instance, all this means is that we no longer go out of our
way to use backwards-compatible APIs (ie to avoid newer APIs). At that
stage, it's quite possible that much or all Python code will still work
on an older platform.

But at a certain point, we may decide to de-clutter the codebase by
removing particular #ifdefs and workarounds which exist to support a
now-unsupported platform. At that point, you would expect Python to no
longer be usable on that platform in some way or another.


Of course, if you're happy to work with a slightly older version of
Python, such as 3.2, then you should be fine.

TJG