Drop unsupported Python 2.6, 3.2 and 3.3?

[hugovk]

Reasons for dropping old ones

They're all EOL. Dropping 2.6 would allow unittest vs unittest2 code to be dropped and simplified. Dropping 3.2 would simplify Unicode handling. Dropping 3.3 has fewer gains, but would still reduce the support burden somewhat.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPython#Version_history

2.6

• https://snarky.ca/stop-using-python-2-6/
• http://www.curiousefficiency.org/posts/2015/04/stop-supporting-python26.html
• http://www.python3statement.org
• Current pip 9 deprecates Python 2.6 support, pip 10 won't support it (https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/3955)
• Not much PyPI traffic (June 2016) https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/3796

3.2

• pip 8 no longer supports Python 3.2 (link)
• Coverage 4 no longer supports Python 3.2 (link)
• Requests no longer supports Python 3.2
• Virtually no PyPI traffic (June 2016) https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/3796

3.3

• pip 10 will deprecate Python 3.3 support, pip 11 won't support it (https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/3796)
• Very little PyPI traffic (June 2016) https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/3796

[hugovk]

Here's pip download stats for the last month from PyPI for nose:

$ pypinfo --percent --pip nose pyversion
python_version percent download_count
-------------- ------- --------------
2.7            82.5%        1,255,115
3.6            7.8%           117,938
3.5            6.0%            91,210
3.4            3.1%            46,511
2.6            0.5%             7,426
3.3            0.2%             2,451
3.7            0.0%                90
None           0.0%                46
3.2            0.0%                27
3.1            0.0%                 1

[hugovk]

Nose has been in maintenance mode for the past several years and will likely cease without a new person/team to take over maintainership. New projects should consider using Nose2, py.test, or just plain unittest/unittest2.

http://nose.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

This note is over two years old: https://github.com/nose-devs/nose/commit/0f40fa995384afad77e191636c89eb7d5b8870ca. From the comments:

Besides, we agreed that Nose was going to be in maintenance mode, Nose2 was the way forward, and that was part of the reason I took over maintainership at all. Personally, I wasn't ever agreeing to help make Nose live forever--it was more of a fix critical bugs the best I could with the time that I had available. There's some serious deficiencies in the Nose code base that can only be fixed with a lot of TLC, and no one on the current team really has the energy to commit to it.

That is not a knock on anyone... Nose has been around a long time, has lived through several changes in unit testing mentality, and across a number of versions of Python. It's legacy and with that comes the cruft of organic growth. It's just way more than I can deal with alone.