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

[Dag Sverre Seljebotn]

On 07/27/2011 08:11 PM, Robert Bradshaw wrote:
> 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.

Stefan mentioned 2.3 being "all red" -- would you support 2.3 for Cython 
0.15 even if it's a lot of work? If it's not much work I agree, I just 
don't think it's a valuable use of our time if things need fixing. It's 
not like 0.14.x will become unavailable.

Dag Sverre