[Scons-dev] Should we remove python 3.5 from our CI tests

[Russel Winder]

On Fri, 2018-07-20 at 16:11 -0400, Jonathon Reinhart wrote:
> > True but who uses Debian Stable for anything relating to software
> > development, it is a server distribution.
> 
> I'm not sure where you got the idea that Debian is a "server
> distribution". Lots of people use Debian as a desktop OS, and my team
> uses Debian for software development.

Debian Stable is an excellent server distribution. All the developers I
know that use Debian use Debian Sid for software development. I use
Debian Sid for all my work, though I dual boot Fedora Rawhide for
testing, I see no positive benefit to using Debian Stable as a work
platform for software development.

> I think SCons would be making a serious mistake if it dropped support
> for Python 3.5. Just because the distro is using an older version of
> SCons, doesn't mean that SCons shouldn't support the latest version
> of
> Python available on the system.

I think I agree with this. If we were talking about 3.4, i'd say drop
it. But 3.5 is a reasonable lower limit at the moment. OK it means not
being able to use some good stuff from 3.6 and 3.7 but that is not
possible anyway if running on 2.7 is required, and a lot of the new
stuff in 3.6 and 3.7 is just trendy rubbish that never should have made
it into the distribution – it should have been packages hosted in PyPI.

> This is particularly troublesome for me as I consider putting
> together
> a new build image, based on Debian 9, but with latest SCons installed
> from source.
> 
> I'm all for cleaning up old cruft, but it seems like removing support
> for a version of Python that's less than 3 years old seems a bit
> aggressive.

I agree. In a couple of years when we have 3.8 or 3.9 I'll be all for
dropping 3.5 and 2.7 and refactoring the codebase to 3.6.

-- 
Russel.
===========================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk
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