drop python2 and python <3.3

aradi / fypp

Python powered Fortran preprocessor

http://fypp.readthedocs.io

BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" License

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drop python2 and python <3.3 #10

Closed dev-zero closed 3 years ago

dev-zero commented 3 years ago

Linux distributions (for example Ubuntu in 18.04) started to drop the /usr/bin/python to /usr/bin/python2 symlink as the next step to deprecate Python 2, resulting in not found errors when running fypp as an executable. Hence it might be time to switch to Python 3. Since Python 3.2 was EOL'd much earlier than Python 2.7, it should be fairly safe to drop support for everything prior to Python 3.3.

aradi commented 3 years ago

I agree on your suggestion, that Fypp should run on Python 3 by default. Actually, the first line of bin/fypp had been also accordingly modified already. The support for Python 2 (and 3.{1-3}) we should still keep IMO, unless there are strong reasons against it. Based on feedback/complaints about badly maintained HPC-centers, it guess, it takes ca. 7 years, until discontinued Python versions really vanish from "production" environments. (So, we would drop Python 2 around 2027 :wink:).

dev-zero commented 3 years ago

Well, this is of course up to you, although I don't see the need for it:

most datacenters provide at least one version of Python 3 since there are many other packages which need to build (or run) Python 3
if a project bundles fypp, it can decide to use an older version which still supports python 2
if a project does not bundle fypp it will fail to build on a system without Python 3 (if it doesn't call it via an explicit interpreter)

aradi commented 3 years ago

@dev-zero I've made up my mind. With Python 2.7 reaching its EOL already a year ago, it is fair to drop it from the supported version. Actually, I think, we could also drop Python 3.3 and 3.4 from the official list of supported Python-versions (their first stable release being more than 7 years old) and stay with 3.5 and above.