[gentoo-dev-announce] Python 2.6 to be masked on 2014-04-28

["Michał Górny" <mgorny@gentoo.org>]

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Developers and users,

On behalf of Python team, I would like to announce that we are planning
on starting the process of removing Python 2.6. The process will start
with masking the python2_6 target USE flags and relevant packages. If
nobody strongly disagrees with this, we will commit the masks one week
from now, on 2014-04-28.

Afterwards, Python 2.7 (with experimental support for PyPy and Jython
2.7) will be the only version of Python 2 supported in Gentoo. Python
2.7 is mostly backwards compatible with 2.6 and all of the packages
in Gentoo supporting Python 2.6 support 2.7 as well. Therefore,
switching to 2.7 should be painless to most of our users.

If you have any doubts about this change, please do not hesitate to
reply to this mail, to the gentoo-dev@ mailing list. In case you have
more general migration problems, you can contact us through
the gentoo-python mailing list [1] or #gentoo-python IRC channel
on Freenode [2].


Rationale:

The last version of Python 2.6 was released on 2013-10-29 and was
announced as the last official release [3]. Therefore, Python 2.6
is no longer maintained upstream and security fixes are no longer
provided.

Moreover, a growing number of Python projects are removing support
for Python 2.6. If their reverse dependencies are still installed with
Python 2.6 support, this prevents the package manager from upgrading
them and leaves users with outdated, potentially vulnerable versions.

[1]:http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/lists.xml
[2]:http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/irc.xml
[3]:https://www.python.org/download/releases/2.6.9/

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny

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