Dropping support for Python 2.6 on Windows

Gregory Szorc gregory.szorc at gmail.com
Thu Mar 16 16:54:27 UTC 2017


There is a brewing discussion about the future of Python 2.6 in Mercurial.
I'd like to start with what I think will be an easy proposal: officially
dropping support for 2.6 on Windows.

First, I think dropping 2.6 on Windows doesn't really buy us anything
significant. 2.6 and 2.7 build with the same (ancient) Visual Studio
toolchain. So it isn't like 2.6 is holding us back on C primitives we can
use or anything. Also, I'm pretty sure none of the Mercurial on Windows
packages we (or others) distribute use Python 2.6. So I don't think we save
packagers any work.

My main reason for dropping 2.6 on Windows is to get the policy change out
of the way.

Supporting this proposal is the fact that (correct me if I'm wrong)
Mercurial with 2.6 on Windows is not tested nor widely used (see previous
point about no packages targeting it). The only way (I think) people can
get Mercurial running with 2.6 on Windows is if they download the source
and compile it locally (possibly via pip). I think that's generally a small
set of all Mercurial users on Windows and Python 2.6 users are a sliver of
that population.

Furthermore, I'm not aware of anyone in the Mercurial project doing Python
2.6 development on Windows. Linux and 2.6, yes. Windows and 2.7, yes. But
not 2.6 on Windows.

If we can't adequately test and support Mercurial with Python 2.6 on
Windows, I argue it shouldn't be supported.

My formal proposal is:

a) establish a policy that Mercurial with Python 2.6 is not supported on
Windows starting in the 4.2 release
b) setup.py and `hg` reject Python 2.6 on Windows
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