On 2022-11-06 07:09, Michał Górny wrote: > Hi, everyone. > > I think it's time to ask once again: how much do you need Python 3.8 > target to remain available in Gentoo? > > Right now we support four CPython targets: 3.8 through 3.11. 3.10 is > the current default, we're going to move 3.11 from ~arch to stable soon. > We've also added the first alpha release of Python 3.12 but it's not > going to make it into PYTHON_TARGETS until the feature freeze (planned > for May 2023). > > Right now 3.8 and 3.9 are both in "security" supported state upstream, > i.e. they no longer receive bugfixes except for (some of) security > backports. Backporting more security fixes hasn't been much of > a problem, though it means we're slowly diverging from vanilla installs. > > Python packages tend to continue providing support or at least working > with Python 3.8. I suspect that if a package is missing 3.8 target, > it's more often because it wasn't tested than because it doesn't work.
Some packages fail tests on py3.8, see: https://github.com/fastavro/fastavro/issues/558 And it's often unclear whether a package is broken on a specific Python version or on all of them. So having lots of targets is a problem for debugging. > So, no major reason to remove Python 3.8, except that testing packages > on four interpreters obviously takes more time than on three, and this > is starting to become noticeable.
