[oe] Supported Python version for OE?

[Martyn Welch]

Joshua Lock wrote:
> Hi,
>
> A question, (perhaps for the TSC?):
>
> 	"What's the minimum Python version we want to support in OE?"
>
> According to the wiki we support Python 2.4 and above but I wonder if
> people have any thoughts with regards to bumping it?
>   

I'd suggest that the better question to ask is:

     "Which versions of which distros do we currently intend OE to work on?"

Given that the revisions of Python for the following distributions are
as follows:

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS - 2.6.5
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS - 2.5.2

Debian lenny (stable) - 2.5.2
Debian squeeze (testing) - 2.5.3
Debian sid (unstable) - 2.5.4
Debian etch (oldstable) - 2.4.4

Fedora 12 - 2.6.2
Fedora 11 - 2.6
Fedora 10 - 2.5.2
Fedora 9 - 2.5.1
Fedora 8 - 2.5.1
Fedora 7 - 2.5
Fedora 6 - 2.4.3

RHEL6 (beta) - 2.6.2
RHEL5 - 2.4.3

OpenSUSE 11.2 - 2.6.2
OpenSUSE 11.1 - 2.6.0
OpenSUSE 11.0 - 2.5.2

This would suggest that using 2.5 features should be ok for the majority
of people. My one area of concern would be those using RHEL. RHEL 6
isn't out yet and v.5 uses 2.4.3 - this wouldn't impact me, so I'm not
overly fussed.

> The reason I ask is because I had a user contact me about using Python
> 2.5 features (str.partition) in relocatable.bbclass, I hadn't even
> noticed this and seems like not many others have but it's clearly
> affecting at least one person.
>
> I have a pretty trivial (if ugly) patch to work around this, but it
> raised an interesting question so I thought I'd ask that before sending
> the patch.
>   

The only other question I can think of is "is there an advantage to
using the Python 2.5 features?".

Martyn
> Cheers,
> Joshua
>   


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