[Python-Dev] Drop OS/2 and VMS support?

Tue Apr 19 21:51:34 CEST 2011

Doug Hellmann wrote:
>> On Apr 19, 2011, at 10:36 AM, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
>>> Victor Stinner wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>>>> I asked one year ago if we should drop OS/2 support: Andrew MacIntyre,
>>> our OS/2 maintainer, answered:
>>> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2010-April/099477.html
>>>>>> Extract: << The 3.x branch needs quite a bit of work on OS/2 to 
>>> deal with Unicode, as OS/2 was one of the earlier OSes with full 
>>> multiple language support and IBM developed a unique API. I'm still 
>>> struggling to come to terms with this, partly because I myself don't 
>>> "need" it. >>
>>>>>> So one year later, Python 3 does still not support OS/2.
>>>>>> --
>>>>>> About VMS: I don't know if anyone is using Python (2 or 3) on VMS, or if
>>> Python 3 does work on VMS. I bet that it does just not compile :-)
>>>>>> I don't know anyone using VMS or OS/2.
>>>>>> --
>>>>>> There are 39 #ifdef VMS and 52 #ifdef OS2. We can keep them and wait
>>> until someone work on these OSes to ensure that the test suite pass. But
>>> if nobody cares of these OSes and nobody wants to maintain them, it
>>> would be easier for the maintenance of the Python source code base to
>>> remove specific code.
>>>>>> Well, not "remove" directly, but plan to remove it using the PEP 11
>>> procedure (mark OS/2 and VMS as unsupported, and remove the code in
>>> Python 3.4).
>>>> The Python core team is not really representative of the Python
>> community users, so I think this needs a different approach:
>>>> Instead of simply deprecating OSes without notice to the general
>> Python community, how about doing a "call for support" for these
>> OSes ?
>>>> If that doesn't turn up maintainers, then we can take the PEP 11
>> route.
>> Victor, if you want to post the "call for support" to Python Insider, let me know off list and I will set you up with access.

I can help with that if you like.
-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com
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