Dropping support for Python 2.6 on Windows

[Simon Farnsworth]

On 16/03/2017 10:14, Augie Fackler wrote:
> 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.
>
Just as added data for this decision, we (Facebook) will stop shipping 
and testing Mercurial built against Python 2.6 no later than 2017-04-30 
(when we lose internal security support for our Python 2.6 systems). So 
the 4.3 release is likely to be the last release where we provide Python 
2.6 testing during the freeze.

We're hoping that our last consumers of Python 2.6 Mercurial will move 
onto Python 2.7 before 2017-03-31, so for the 4.3 freeze we're likely to 
only be running the test suite, not also getting feedback from real users.
-- 
Simon Farnsworth