[tahoe-dev] let's stop supporting versions of Python other than v2.7 on Windows

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

Folks:

By "supporting" here, I mean going out of our way to provide binary
eggs of dependencies, and actively soliciting people to run
buildslaves.

Let's do those things only for Python 2.7, and not for other versions
of Python, on Windows. Also let's maintain all of our docs describing
Python 2.7 on Windows.

Here is the current matrix of binary packages that we host:

http://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/README.html

Here is the current set of Supported Builders in our buildbot herd:

http://tahoe-lafs.org/buildbot/

(Click on "Supported Builders".)

Python 2.7 is the version of Python from the best of all possible
worlds. It is the end of the line of the Python 2 project, and the
Python core developers are not going to be making any new changes to
Python 2 other than bugfixes. On the other hand, most people still
haven't made the jump to Python 3, and in my opinion it will be at
least a few years if not forever before a majority of Python users do
so. This is perfect! It means Python 2.7 is that rarest of birds: a
software platform that is truly stable for the long term even though
it is still actively used and supported.

Also, Python 2.7 is supported by the PyPy project, and I'm a big fan
of PyPy, so that makes me even happier about it.

As for what versions of Python we support on all other platforms than
Windows, I propose that we continue our long-standing tradition of
supporting everything from Python 2.4.4 up to 2.7. I would be happy to
stop having to think about Python 2.4 support, but FreeStorm has been
running this CentOS 5 buildslave for years now, and CentOS 5 comes
with Python 2.4, and FreeStorm's buildslave still has Python 2.4. I
take this as (a) evidence that someone cares about Python 2.4) and (b)
evidence that we are actually able to support it (inasmuch as our unit
tests get executed on it automatically after each patch).

Regards,

Zooko