Re: What's our minimum supported Python version?

On Tue, Apr 22, 2025 at 9:04 AM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> I'm also not excited by the idea that an incidental
> test script gets to dictate what the cutoff is.

I agree, and I don't intend for the script to dictate that.

> Maybe it's sufficient to make a documentation change here, and
> say we support Python >= 3.5? I'd be okay with saying 3.6.8
> too, on the grounds that if anything older fails to work we'd
> almost certainly just say "too bad".

I'm definitely on board with pulling the minimum up, as high as we
think we can get away with. If you're comfortable with 3.6(.8), I'd
say let's start there.

> But RHEL8 is widespread
> enough that I think we need to keep making the effort for 3.6.8.

Even if we can get side-by-side versions working? RHEL8 has a bunch of
newer Python 3 versions available, according to the docs. And
virtualenvs can do a lot of lifting for us in practice.

Thanks,
--Jacob