Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev-announce

From: "Michał Górny" <mgorny@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev-announce@l.g.o
Cc: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-dev-announce] Python 2.6 to be masked on 2014-04-28
Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2014 17:14:42
Message-Id: 20140420174313.63ec49f1@pomiot.lan
1 Developers and users,
2
3 On behalf of Python team, I would like to announce that we are planning
4 on starting the process of removing Python 2.6. The process will start
5 with masking the python2_6 target USE flags and relevant packages. If
6 nobody strongly disagrees with this, we will commit the masks one week
7 from now, on 2014-04-28.
8
9 Afterwards, Python 2.7 (with experimental support for PyPy and Jython
10 2.7) will be the only version of Python 2 supported in Gentoo. Python
11 2.7 is mostly backwards compatible with 2.6 and all of the packages
12 in Gentoo supporting Python 2.6 support 2.7 as well. Therefore,
13 switching to 2.7 should be painless to most of our users.
14
15 If you have any doubts about this change, please do not hesitate to
16 reply to this mail, to the gentoo-dev@ mailing list. In case you have
17 more general migration problems, you can contact us through
18 the gentoo-python mailing list [1] or #gentoo-python IRC channel
19 on Freenode [2].
20
21
22 Rationale:
23
24 The last version of Python 2.6 was released on 2013-10-29 and was
25 announced as the last official release [3]. Therefore, Python 2.6
26 is no longer maintained upstream and security fixes are no longer
27 provided.
28
29 Moreover, a growing number of Python projects are removing support
30 for Python 2.6. If their reverse dependencies are still installed with
31 Python 2.6 support, this prevents the package manager from upgrading
32 them and leaves users with outdated, potentially vulnerable versions.
33
34 [1]:http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/lists.xml
35 [2]:http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/irc.xml
36 [3]:https://www.python.org/download/releases/2.6.9/
37
38 --
39 Best regards,
40 Michał Górny

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