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

[Matthew Knepley]

On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 5:38 PM, Satish Balay <balay at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

> Sorry - I was looking at the wrong date - and ended up captured e-mail
> from sept 2013.
>
> Here are the numbers for e-mail starting aug-2014.
>
>      10 2.4
>     162 2.6
>     310 2.7
>

I would trade 2% of support requests for parallel configure.

  Matt


> Total: 482
>
> Satish
>
> On Tue, 13 Oct 2015, Satish Balay wrote:
>
> > For emails starting from sept 2014 - I have 865 configure.log files
> > [with python version listed].
> >
> > Here is the count for various versions:
> >
> >     28  2.4
> >     284 2.6
> >     553 2.7
> >
> > Note: most of our nightlybuild machines are using ubuntu 12.04 - which
> defaults to python-2.6
> >
> > Satish
> >
> >
> > On Tue, 13 Oct 2015, Barry Smith wrote:
> >
> > >
> > >   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
> > > >>>
> > > >>
> > > >>
> > > >
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
>
>


-- 
What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their
experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their
experiments lead.
-- Norbert Wiener
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