[Cython] Should we drop support for CPython 2.3? (and maybe even 2.4?)

[Robert Bradshaw]

On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 9:51 AM, mark florisson
<markflorisson88 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 27 July 2011 18:46, Vitja Makarov <vitja.makarov at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 2011/7/27 Stefan Behnel <stefan_ml at behnel.de>:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> quick question before raising a poll on the users mailing list.
>>>
>>> Would anyone mind dropping support for CPython 2.3?
>>>
>>> 1) it's long out of maintenance, even the last security release dates back
>>> to early 2008
>>>
>>> 2) there have been seven main releases of CPython since then, four of which
>>> were in the 2.x line, starting with 2.4 in late 2004 - even 2.5 was released
>>> five years ago
>>>
>>> 3) it produces weird and annoying errors in Jenkins, or rather none at all
>>> most of the time, since the test suite does not run the doctests on 2.3
>>> anyway
>>>
>>> 4) the new code that was written by Vitja and Mark would be (or would have
>>> been) cleaner with decorators and other 'recent' Python features
>>>
>>> There are two sides to this: dropping support for running Cython in 2.3 and
>>> dropping support for compiling the generated code in 2.3. The first is the
>>> more interesting one. It's not strictly required to do both, we could
>>> continue to support it at the C level, but given how badly tested Cython is
>>> on that version anyway, I think stating that the generated code is 2.3
>>> compatible is already hand waving today. So we may even just let the C code
>>> support fade out silently until someone actually notices.
>>>
>>> Actually, even 2.4 is a candidate for dropping support for running Cython on
>>> it. The last release dates back to December 2008, and its lack of 64 bit
>>> support makes it severly less attractive than even 2.5, which is also going
>>> out of security-fix maintenance now.
>>>
>>> Comments?
>>>
>>
>> +1
>>
>> I think we should completely drop 2.3 and 2.4 support. I hope nobody
>> use it with recent Cython versions.

I'm OK with dropping 2.3, but lets pose the question on cython-users
as well first. If so, we'd declare 0.15 as the last release
"supporting" 2.3. Dropping 2.4 seems to have less advantages and more
disadvantages, but is worth inquiring about as well.

- Robert