Re: What's our minimum supported Python version?

On Wed, 23 Apr 2025 at 10:15, Devrim Gündüz <devrim(at)gunduz(dot)org> wrote:
> I would love to have such an evidence -- but I don't have :) In the last
> couple of weeks I've also been thinking of bumping every single Python
> piece in the PGDG RPM repository to 3.9 (at least) on RHEL 8, but that
> will break many things immediately. It is still a very major platform
> for users and such a breakage is not welcome.

Sad... Sounds like a bump to 3.9 is probably out of the question for PG18 then.

Can you share some examples of the things that break? Because if (and
I'm hopeful that Jacob will be adding some) for PG19 we get more
testing infrastructure in Python, I wouldn't want all that extra
testing infra to be stuck on Python3.6 for the next 5 years.

I think the UX that we should make work for compiling/testing infra on
RHEL8 is the following:
yum install python39
./configure PYTHON=python39 # or equivalent meson
make check-world

That seems like a reasonable hurdle for people using RHEL8 to jump
over if they want to compile themselves. Especially since when
installing from pgdg-rpm the package could simply depend on the
python39 package.

I haven't tried, but I'm pretty sure we're not there yet. At minimum I
believe we'd have to change our shebang's from:
#!/usr/bin/env python3

To something that takes into account the passed in PYTHON option.