On 22/08/2015 02:02, Chris Angelico wrote:
The security concerns of XP aren't Python's problem, and Python isn't in the business of twisting people's arms to make them upgrade just for the sake of upgrading. However, every new version of Windows introduces new APIs and features, so maintaining support for an older version means ignoring all features added since then; conversely, dropping support for XP means taking advantage of anything that was added in Vista. That's why the change in support.
Thanks for saying this, Chris. Just to add, from a Python developer perspective: any system -- Microsoft or not, open or not, old or new -- which core Python supports, brings a measure of complexity to the codebase. #ifdefs, conditional LoadLibrary calls &c. From the point of view simply of the maintenance burden, less code is better. Obviously there is more to deciding on platform support than code maintenance ...
This isn't some kind of political move by the Python dev team to undercut Windows users: it's entirely pragmatic. And using the Windows support calendar is a common-sense way of giving ourselves a set of cut-off dates.
TJG -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
