[petsc-dev] Python version

[Sean Farley]

On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 8:04 PM, Satish Balay <balay at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> On Mon, 4 Feb 2013, Jed Brown wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 7:35 PM, Karl Rupp <rupp at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
>>
>> > Hi Jed,
>> >
>> > interesting, thanks for sharing. I don't think that there is a significant
>> > difference for PETSc users, since most Python installations come from
>> > package repositories (as shown on the page). On clusters I'd say that there
>> > is a slight bias towards older versions in general, not just Python.
>> >
>>
>> The article has massive selection bias: all people surveyed are actively
>> using Python in their work. Many PETSc users don't write Python at all,
>> PETSc is just using it for the build. If latter population was as
>> up-to-date as these astro folks, we'd be able to drop compatibility for
>> 10-year old versions of Python and upgrade a lot of cruddy code.
>
> Since we use python for configure [which is supporsed to be portable]
> - we shouldn't be insiting on single/latest version of python - like
> any of these python applications can do. We have to support as
> many[and old] version as we can.

At least specifying >= 2.5 we can support both python 2 & 3 with the
same codebase.