[petsc-dev] Do we still need to support python 2.4?

[Barry Smith]

  Satish,

  Can you check all the configure.log files we have received in that last year for the python version? If a vanishing small number are below 2.7 we can make 2.7 the minimum requirement. Or 2.6   With your pine mail you should be able to write a python3 script in just a few minutes to check this.


  Barry
> On Oct 13, 2015, at 2:36 PM, Satish Balay <balay at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> 
> Previously - I've used the currently supported RHEL as a base case.
> 
> Since RHEL5 is still currently supported -and it defaults to
> python-2.4 we've used python-2.4 as the minimum for petsc configure.
> 
> However its 8 years old - [and now RHEL had much longer lifecycle 11+
> years - in extended-support mode]
> 
> I'm not sure how many users still have this old version [or other
> software stack that defaults to python-2.4]. Perhaps its ok to upgrade
> the requirements in petsc master [I'm not completely sure about it.\
> 
> And RHEL-6 defaults to python-2.6. [so when we update the minimum
> version - I would go for that]
> 
> Satish
> 
> 
> On Tue, 13 Oct 2015, Barry Smith wrote:
> 
>> 
>>   This depends on what (prehistoric) distributions of Linux are still commonly used that only have 2.4. In our experience many users still use very old distributions and asking them to "upgrade" is not likely to be successful since the users don't control the machines they use.
>> 
>>  This is why we kept 2.4 I think we need to keep 2.4 support
>> 
>>  Barry
>> 
>>> On Oct 13, 2015, at 2:19 PM, Tobin Isaac <tisaac at ices.utexas.edu> wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Honest question.  I've got some changes in buildsystem
>>> (tisaac/buildsystem-feature-parallel) that heavily use the 
>>> with-statement context manager introduced in python 2.5.
>>> 
>>> Cheers,
>>> Toby
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>