[SciPy-Dev] Required Python Version

[David Cournapeau]

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 7:09 PM, David Warde-Farley <dwf at cs.toronto.edu> wrote:

>
> I had this discussion with Fernando, Brian and Gael last year in Pasadena, and they came to the conclusion that while there may be people still running crufty versions of Python, it's dubious that the same users would be installing bleeding edge IPython... The relative difficulty in building NumPy and SciPy makes me wonder whether people on these 2.4 platforms are even building from more recent tarballs, nevermind SVN.

Building numpy and scipy is difficult, but it is nothing compared to
having to build pygtk/pyqt, etc... which is necessary if you build
your own python.

A lot of clusters and co run on RHEL/Centos, for example. Building
numpy/scipy by yourself is doable, a whole python toolset not so much.

> What's the most recent version of NumPy or SciPy that's packaged for RHEL by the vendor?

They are ancient IIRC - when I worked in a company which used RHEL, it
was useless, I compiled atlas/numpy/scipy by myself.

Knowing how many people depend on python 2.4 support is not possible,
so we are a bit in the dark. But again, as mentioned by Pauli already,
supporting 2.4 instead of 2.5 is not that difficult - the cost is
really low. And as a data point, a lot of heavily used libraries also
support python 2.4.

David