[Zope-dev] dropping Python 2.4 support in the Zope Toolkit?

Benji York benji at zope.com
Tue May 5 14:12:04 EDT 2009


On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 1:03 PM, Hermann Himmelbauer <dusty at qwer.tk> wrote:
> Am Dienstag 05 Mai 2009 16:46:03 schrieb Martijn Faassen:
>> Hey,
>>
>> Martijn Faassen wrote:
>> > Martijn Faassen wrote:
>> >> In order to get to a conclusion:
>> >>
>> >> I haven't seen convincing arguments yet *not* to drop the Python 2.4 for
>> >> new releases of the Zope Toolkit libraries.
>> >>
>> >> I'd like to phrase the debate in those terms instead of the reverse,
>> >> because ensuring Python 2.4 compatibility is an additional burden for
>> >> developers and we need good arguments for *not* dropping this burden.
>> >
>> > Since I haven't seen such arguments besides the Plone 3.x related ones,
>> > I will amend the zope toolkit decisions about this.
>>
>> A few more arguments popped up since then, as I half expected, so I'll
>> remove that decision and re-open the discussion for a while. I don't
>> want to upset a whole lot of Plone folks.
>
> Hmmm, maybe I'll come up with my suggestion publicly:
>
> If I understood the problem right, one main reason for dropping Python 2.4 is
> some error in .tar.gz compression.

That was the trigger, but not the primary reason.

> I personally still somehow miss strong arguments for dropping Python 2.4
> (except for the above bug).

The motivators seem to be:

- 2.4 is old (it's more than 3.5 years old, people want to use new
  features)
- no further bug fix releases will be made for it (the fact that a major
  bug was introduced in 2.4.5 with no hope of it ever being fixed)
- including 2.4 we have to support 3 major versions Python

Most people seem to be moving to 2.5 or 2.6 and we (the community) don't
have a good infrastructure to support 2.4, 2.5, and 2.6 on each of the
platforms we want.
-- 
Benji York
Senior Software Engineer
Zope Corporation


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