Python 2.76

[Chris Angelico]

On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 1:30 AM, Joel Goldstick <joel.goldstick at gmail.com> wrote:
> No, I just meant to point out that these people are using a version of
> 2.7 with the OS the OP is using.
> Maybe that is helpful to know.

Sure. A little extra verbiage could have made that clearer :)

Unfortunately it's not proof; they seem to be doing their own builds,
so it's actually possible that they've changed something to make it
work on those platforms (which, if it were true, would explain the lag
on versions - it takes work to maintain something like that, and it's
often not worth redoing that for each bugfix release). So while it may
be helpful, it's certainly not conclusive.

I did a bit of quick poking around, and didn't find anywhere a simple
list of the officially-supported platforms for each Python release.
PEP 11 links it to Microsoft's support lifecycle, which means you have
to go pointer-chasing a bit to figure out what's supported. So there's
this:

http://support2.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=14134

Now, Python 2.7.0 came out in 2010:

https://www.python.org/download/releases/2.7

Which means Server 2008 R2 was around when it was first released. I'm
not entirely sure what "Service Pack Support End Date" means, but in
any case, there's mainstream support for Server 2008 R2 until 2015,
ergo Python 2.7.8 should be supported. But it's a smidge complicated
to look this all up, and I'm not confident that my lookups have been
entirely correct. Feel free to do your own pointer chase and verify or
disprove my results.

ChrisA