installer user interface glitch ?

[rurpy at yahoo.com]

On Sunday, November 1, 2015 at 8:52:55 AM UTC-7, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 2, 2015 at 2:43 AM, rurpy--- via Python-list <python-list at python.org> wrote:
> > Why, oh why, do the python.org front page and other pages that offer
> > a Windows download not say a word about it not running on Windows XP?
> >
> > Even if one is anal enough to go to the page about the 3.5 release.
> >   https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-350/
> > a page with a lot of Windows-specific info, there is not a word
> > about XP.
> 
> A partial answer to that is in PEP 11:
> 
> https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0011/#microsoft-windows
> 
> Windows XP isn't special here. There's no mention of Python 2.7 not
> working on Windows 95, because it's simply an unsupported operating
> system. The only reason that people keep coming asking about XP and
> not (say) Win2K is that there are a lot more XP boxes out there. Do
> the other download pages need to stipulate which versions of which
> OSes they support, or should that be left up to the installer?

I dont recall seeing anyone posting asking why they could not get 
Python to install on Windows 95 recently.  I only read this group
intermittently but I have seen *many* posts asking why they couldnt
install on XP.

You acknowledge yourself: "there are a lot more XP boxes out there."

> There *is* a plan to have the installer give a better error message
> for this situation.

A better message from the installer is necessary but not sufficient.
Don't make people go through the effort to download the whole thing,
do their planning and preparations for using or upgrading Python 
only to discover at the last moment it wont work.

That is really shitty customer relations.

The reality is that people trying install Python-3.5 on XP *is* a 
problem.  Telling them they should have read some obscure release 
notes is not a solution.

> But I don't think the web site necessarily has to
> have noise about old versions of OSes. Where would you draw the line?

I think my responses above answer that.