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

[Åsmund Ervik]

Dear petsc-dev,

Apropos this discussion, I just came across the following from Nick
Coghlan, one of the CPython core devs and a Red Hat guy, and thought it
might be useful for reference. You could even link to it in the error
message suggested by Barry below; Nick explicitly invites people to do so.

http://www.curiousefficiency.org/posts/2015/04/stop-supporting-python26.html

Best regards,
Åsmund


> Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2015 18:01:55 -0500
> From: Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov>
> To: Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com>
> Cc: petsc-dev <petsc-dev at mcs.anl.gov>
> Subject: Re: [petsc-dev] Do we still need to support python 2.4?
>
>
>> On Oct 13, 2015, at 5:43 PM, Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
>    You are assuming that the number of configure.log sent to us is
uniformly randomly distributed among all the python versions. I might
assume that configure just works much better for python 2.4 users so
that they rarely need to send configure.log :-).
>
>    But, based on the data I have to agree with you. I am fine with
moving the python required version up to 2.6  but note that it is
important that configure print a very helpful message when the users
python is too old.  For example improve the current message by printing
>
>   print '*** You must have Python2 version 2.6 or higher to run
./configure        *****'
>
>                         Try python2.7 ./configure or python2.6
./configure
>
>
>   print '*          Python is easy to install for end users or
sys-admin.              *'
>   print '*                  http://www.python.org/download/
                 *'
>   print '*
                 *'
>   print '*           You CANNOT configure PETSc without Python
                 *'
>   print '*
http://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/documentation/installation.html     *'
>   print
'*******************************************************************************'
>
>  Barry




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