Re: Python 3.5 EOL; when can require 3.6?

[Thomas Huth]

On 16/09/2020 16.00, Thomas Huth wrote:
> On 16/09/2020 14.30, Peter Maydell wrote:
>> On Wed, 16 Sep 2020 at 08:43, Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com> wrote:
>>> We require Python 3.5.  It will reach its "end of life" at the end of
>>> September 2020[*].  Any reason not to require 3.6 for 5.2?  qemu-iotests
>>> already does for its Python parts.
> [...]
>> The default should be
>> "leave the version dependency where it is", not "bump the version
>> dependency as soon as we can".
> 
> OTOH, if none of our supported build systems uses python 3.5 by default
> anymore, it also will not get tested anymore, so bugs might creep in,
> which will of course end up in a bad experience for the users, too, that
> still try to build with such an old version. So limiting the version to
> the level that we also test is IMHO very reasonable.
> 
> Let's have a look at the (older) systems that we support and the python
> versions according to repology.org:
> 
> - RHEL7 / CentOS 7 : 3.6.8
> - Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic) : >= 3.6.5
> - openSUSE Leap 15.0 : >= 3.6.5
> - OpenBSD Ports : >= 3.7.9
> - FreeBSD Ports : >= 3.5.10 - but there is also 3.6 or newer
> - Homebrew : >= 3.7.9
> 
> ... so I think it should be fine to retire 3.5 nowadays.

Sorry, I forgot to check Debian. If I got that right, Debian 9 still
uses Python 3.5 by default. So I guess that means we can not deprecate
Python 3.5 yet?

 Thomas