[Numpy-discussion] On making Numpy 1.7 a long term support release.

[David Cournapeau]

On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 9:08 AM, Ralf Gommers
<ralf.gommers at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 8:51 PM, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers at googlemail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 10:25 AM, David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 7:19 AM, Ralf Gommers
>>> <ralf.gommers at googlemail.com> wrote:
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 7:33 AM, Travis Oliphant <travis at continuum.io>
>>> > wrote:
>>> >>
>>> >> I think supporting Python 2.5 and above is completely fine.  I'd even
>>> >> be
>>> >> in favor of bumping up to Python 2.6 for NumPy 1.7 and certainly for
>>> >> NumPy
>>> >> 2.8
>>> >>
>>> > +1 for dropping Python 2.5 support also for an LTS release. That will
>>> > make
>>> > it a lot easier to use str.format() and the with statement (plus many
>>> > other
>>> > things) going forward, without having to think about if your changes
>>> > can be
>>> > backported to that LTS release.
>>>
>>> At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I would really like to
>>> stay to 2.4, especially for a long term release :) This is still the
>>> basis used by a lots of long-term python products. If we can support
>>> 2.4 for a LTS, I would then be much more comfortable to allow bumping
>>> to 2.5 for 1.8.
>>
>>
>> At the very least someone should step up to do the testing or maintain a
>> buildbot for Python 2.4 then. Also for scipy, assuming that scipy keeps
>> supporting the same Python versions as numpy.
>>
> Here's a list of Python requirements for other important scientific python
> projects:
> - ipython: >= 2.6
> - matplotlib: v1.1 supports 2.4-2.7, v1.2 will support >= 2.6
> - scikit-learn: >= 2.6
> - scikit-image: >= 2.5
> - scikits.statsmodels: >= 2.5 (next release probably >= 2.6)
>
> That there are still some projects/products out there that still use Python
> 2.4 (some examples of such products would be nice by the way) is not enough
> of a reason by itself to continue to support it in new releases. There has
> to be a good reason for those products to require the very latest numpy,
> even though they are fine with a very old Python and older versions of
> almost any other Python package.

I don't think that last argument is relevant for a LTS. Numpy is used
in environments where you cannot easily control what's installed. RHEL
still uses python 2.4 and will be supported until 2014 in the
production phase.

As for projects still using python 2.4, using the most downloaded
packages from this list
http://taichino.appspot.com/pypi_ranking/modules?page=1, most of them
supported python 2.4 or below. lxml, zc.buildout, setuptools, pip,
virtualenv and sqlalchemy do. Numpy itself is also used outside the
strict scientific realm, which is why I am a bit warry about just
comparing with other scientific python packages.

Now, if everybody else is against it, I don't want to be a pain about
it either :)

David