[Biopython-dev] Phasing out support for Python 2.4?

[Brad Chapman]

Hey Peter;
Sounds great to me. Looking forward to being able to use conditional
expressions, collections.defaultdict, functools, and the with
statement. 2.5 had a lot of great stuff.

Brad

> Biopython currently supports Python 2.4, 2.5 and 2.6
> (and seems to work on the current Python 2.7 alpha).
> 
> Is it time to start phasing out support for Python 2.4?
> 
> Reasons for encouraging Python 2.5+ include the
> built in support for sqlite3 (which we can use in the
> BioSQL wrappers) and ElementTree (which we use
> for the phyloXML parser) both of which must currently
> be manually installed for Python 2.4.
> 
> Also ReportLab is talking about dropping support
> for Python 2.4 (another optional dependency of
> Biopython). As far as I know, NumPy haven't yet
> talked about dropping support for Python 2.4.
> 
> I was thinking of the usual deprecation procedure, so
> we'd aim to have at least two releases and one year
> before actually dropping support for Python 2.4. At
> that point older Linux distributions which ship with
> Python 2.4 probably won't be supported anyway.
> 
> e.g. The last version of Ubuntu to have Python 2.4
> as the default was Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake).
> The desktop edition support ended July 2009, but
> the server edition will be maintaned until June 2011.
> 
> Peter
> _______________________________________________
> Biopython-dev mailing list
> Biopython-dev at lists.open-bio.org
> http://lists.open-bio.org/mailman/listinfo/biopython-dev