Re: What's our minimum supported Python version?

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> writes:

> Florents Tselai <florents.tselai@gmail.com> writes:
>> On 19 Apr 2025, at 7:17 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>>> I think we need to do some combination of moving our
>>> minimum-supported-version goalposts forward, making sure that
>>> whatever we claim is the minimum Python version is actually
>>> being tested in the buildfarm, and fixing oauth_server.py
>>> so that it works on that version.
>
>> From an Python ecosystem perspective,
>>  3.9 is the usual minimum that people use in CI matrices nowdays.
>> So if it was up to me, that’s what I’d choose.
>
> Per these numbers, that would be cutting off 31% of the buildfarm,
> including a lot of still-in-support distros such as RHEL8.
> So I would say that's not likely to be our choice.
>
>             regards, tom lane

Also from a python world perspective, we really don't want to run EOL
versions. Besides the security reasons, bugs in thirdy-party
dependencies usually are not fixed and the whole system seems to rot
very quickly.

Of course, this does not happen if one does not rely on third-party
deps. Even in this case, I would say that it is wise to support a
relatively small set because the built-in libs will vary over versions,
and a wide range of versions will cause more troubles like this one.

The oldest non EOL version is 3.9 right now. My suggestion is to follow
the official supported releases. I'm not familiar with the buildfarm,
but I know that python3.6 does not come installed by default in RHEL8,
so instead of installing this version we can simply install 3.9, 3.11 or
3.12.

In a persistent workstation, I believe the following should do the
trick (tested on a 8.5 box):
sudo dnf install python3.12
sudo dnf remove python36

BTW, we are used to create a virtualenv for everything, but that is another topic.

Best regards,
Renan Fonseca