How to discontinue ports completely (py26 deprecation) ...

[Fred Wright]

On Sat, 13 Aug 2016, Christopher Jones wrote:
> > On 12 Aug 2016, at 11:30 pm, Fred Wright <fw at fwright.net> wrote:
> > On Fri, 12 Aug 2016, Chris Jones wrote:
> >> On 11/08/16 20:40, Fred Wright wrote:
> > [...]
> >>> Well, leaving something alone that's working just fine is hardly much of a
> >>> maintenance burden.
> >>
> >> On the other hand, whats the rationale for keeping 2.6, given 2.7 is the
> >> official upstream production version of the 2.x series. What use case
> >> requires 2.6 and cannot move to 2.7 ?
> >
> > Testing code against 2.6 (among others), because it's intended to run on a
> > wide range of platforms, and one wants to make as few assumptions as
> > possible about what Python version(s) the end user might have installed.
> > Some distros lag *way* behind in versions of various things, including
> > Python.
> >
> > If the python.org folks had their way, all 2.x versions would be
> > eradicated, but there were too many pitchforks at the gates to let that
> > happen. :-)
>
> I agree there is no way to migrate completely to 3.x, but I am still not
> really convinced keeping both the 2.6 and 2.7 versions in MacPorts is
> worth the effort. 2.6 needs to be dropped sometime...

Given that the effort involved in keeping it is zero, and the effort
involved in removing it is nonzero, I don't think the "effort" argument
really flies.

I mainly mentioned 3.x as an illustration of how different people have
different opinions as to when older versions of something should be
abandoned, often for good reasons.

Apple declared PowerMacs obsolete a decade ago, but some of us still have
some that work, and which still get used for testing PowerPC code. :-)

As I said, the main value of 2.6 is for testing.  If I publish code that
claims to be compatible with 2.6, then that means I've actually tested it
with 2.6.  And *I* don't want to tell people running 2.6 that they have to
upgrade unless there's a good reason for it.  Even upgrading to a
nominally compatible new version may involve a lot of testing to be sure
it really doesn't break anything.

Fred Wright