Re: Python 3.5 EOL; when can require 3.6?

[Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com>]

On 16/09/2020 14.30, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Sep 2020 at 08:43, Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com> wrote:
>> We require Python 3.5.  It will reach its "end of life" at the end of
>> September 2020[*].  Any reason not to require 3.6 for 5.2?  qemu-iotests
>> already does for its Python parts.
[...]
> The default should be
> "leave the version dependency where it is", not "bump the version
> dependency as soon as we can".

OTOH, if none of our supported build systems uses python 3.5 by default
anymore, it also will not get tested anymore, so bugs might creep in,
which will of course end up in a bad experience for the users, too, that
still try to build with such an old version. So limiting the version to
the level that we also test is IMHO very reasonable.

Let's have a look at the (older) systems that we support and the python
versions according to repology.org:

- RHEL7 / CentOS 7 : 3.6.8
- Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic) : >= 3.6.5
- openSUSE Leap 15.0 : >= 3.6.5
- OpenBSD Ports : >= 3.7.9
- FreeBSD Ports : >= 3.5.10 - but there is also 3.6 or newer
- Homebrew : >= 3.7.9

... so I think it should be fine to retire 3.5 nowadays.

 Thomas