Re: PG20 Minimum Dependency Thread

On Thu, Jun 18, 2026 at 4:35 PM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Granting that our pytest framework should silently give up if
> Python is too old, the decision of which minimum version to target
> is really kind of independent of what PL/Python does. It becomes
> a tradeoff of ease of coding versus "how many platforms do you want
> this test to be able to run on?".

Right.

> I have no insight on what the
> coding benefits are of different Python versions, but I do have
> this freshly-scraped data about how many buildfarm members are
> reporting which major Python version:

wrasse too (Python 3.4.3, Solaris 11.3), which tests PG14-16.

In fact I want to use wrasse as a case study here...

> >>> 2) We don't remove support for OS versions in minor releases
> A strict reading of that is that a released branch can't increase
> its minimum required Python version.

Solaris 11.3 was released in October 2015, with Python 2.6, 2.7, and
3.6. Standard support ended in 2021. So with your stricter reading of
the OS support policy, and N=3, it's lucky that we happened to drop
Python 2 support already. Otherwise, Solaris 11.3 would pin Python 2.6
support until PG17 drops off the matrix in 2028, fifteen years after
end of life.

I think that's patently unreasonable. We should either not adopt that
stricter reading, or else be a lot more proactive in pushing our
minimum dependency list forwards for every release, which is going to
feel punitive.

(Oracle themselves removed Python 2.6 support in the middle of their
11.3 support cycle. The Solaris 11.4 standard support window is now
ten years (2021-2031), and the versions of Python they support today
do not overlap at all with the Python versions they supported at 11.4
GA.)

--Jacob