Dropping support for Python 2.6 on Windows

[Augie Fackler]

On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 09:54:27AM -0700, Gregory Szorc wrote:
> 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.

I'm in favor of this. Perhaps also sound the alarm that 2.6 will be
dropped either in 4.3 or 4.4, since we keep accidentally breaking it,
and dropping it entirely would be a nice quality of life improvement
for the devs. Also, there's some work afoot in service of pypi and pip
that should let us get cffi'd SecureTransport bindings on OS X, and
probably also a nicer http client I don't have to write, but thoes are
all unlikely to support 2.6.

>
> 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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