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

[Peter]

Hi all,

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