It may be time to raise our Python requirement once again. The previous time was three years ago on bug 4213. The distributions seem to have mostly jumped from 2.4 to 2.6, so let's see what 2.6 means in terms of oldest distribution release: RHEL 6: 2.6.6 SLE 11: 2.6.8 Debian 6: 2.6.6 Ubuntu 9.04: 2.6.2 Ubuntu 10.10: 2.6.6 Fedora 11: 2.6.0 Fedora 13: 2.6.4 OpenSUSE 11.1: 2.6.0 OpenSUSE 11.3: 2.6.5 Raising the requirements mainly buys us two things: - Can start using the system subprocess.py, avoiding conflicts and getting bug fixes (bug 4120). - Gives us access to ctypes, which allows us to use pretty much any C API on the system. This gives us a lot more flexibility in what we can do from Python.
2.5+ also adds the ability to turn off the dangerous implicit relative import in packages: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0328/
Should be all done now. Documentation updated, tests are passing and product still works fine.
Tauthon doesn't look like something that will take off, so I don't think is a concern in practice. But it doesn't hurt that we are consistent in how we express our requirement, so I don't see any problem updating the error message.
Fine now!
