[ITK Community] Support for different python versions

[Michka Popoff]

We set the limit to 2.6 in this changeset : https://github.com/Kitware/ITK/commit/d3dbc12873c6534cccd1604e6fd0bbd5dff9f1d7

I did not find many stats about 2.5 usage. Here are two :

http://astrofrog.github.io/blog/2013/01/13/what-python-installations-are-scientists-using/
http://alexgaynor.net/2014/jan/03/pypi-download-statistics/

The second one is interesting as it is a dump of the PyPI download statics. We have 0.115% of usage for python 2.5 (don’t know how exact those values are).

We can still go back to 2.5 if needed, but I think we should then have a running test machine for this case. I don’t want to break anything.

As this was merged in release, we will see when ITK 4.5.2 is released how many people ask to get python 2.5 back.
Or perhaps we should have a deprecation message saying python 2.5 support will be gone for ITK 4.6 ?

Michka

On 14 févr. 2014, at 18:05, Brian Helba <brian.helba at kitware.com> wrote:

> Hi Michka,
> 
> In my own opinion, it's objectively quite unreasonable to support Python 2.5 at this point, and 2.4 should be absolutely out of consideration (it doesn't even have the 'with' statement). Nevertheless, it all depends on our users. We support C++ compilers that are older too (Python 2.5 was released September 2006), but of course Python is free to upgrade.
> 
> I've found the general advice [1] on the Python site to be good, and it's what I've followed when porting other code to Python 3 myself.
> 
> [1] http://docs.python.org/dev/howto/pyporting.html
> 
> Best,
> Brian
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 10:43 AM, Michka Popoff <michkapopoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I am currently cleaning up the python code in ITK (pep8 cleanup and removing some old deprecated stuff).
> I wanted to know what versions of python would we like to support? I found some compatibility code going back to python 2.3.
> 
> My proposition is to support 2.7.x and 2.6.x officially, which should not be too difficult.
> 
> I will possibly look for python 3 compatibility in the next months, as swig seems to support python 3. (I hope this is feasible without too much pain)
> If anyone has some knowledge about maintaining code with python 2/3 compatibility, any piece of advice is welcome.
> 
> Any thoughts on this?
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> 
> 
> -- 
> Brian Helba
> Medical Imaging
> Kitware, Inc.

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