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Comment by Aissen | Hacker News Reader

I'm more annoyed for the "Drop support for Python 3.5" than the first one. There are a few codebases I maintain where I already had to pin the pip version because the machine runs python 3.4, and then pin other package versions that did drop support for older python3 versions.

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Why can't you ship your own interpreter to the machine? It's a mistake to ship python source code out to some distro maintained interpreter. Think of your interpreter, dependencies and source code as one atomic unit.

You can, of course, think of it this way; and you probably should. But, it also means more work, and you might as well update your distro if you go down that path. I'm reluctant to build & ship my own python for a very simple reason: you then take on the role&responsibilities of the distribution maintainers. I've taken over these roles in the past, and I recognize that this is hard, thankless work. You have to weight whether or not you can do better than the major distributions (you probably can't), and if it's even worth your time.

Probably because Python 3.5 was EOL’d last year and 3.4 two years ago.

https://endoflife.date/python

Python 3.5 is the latest you can get on Debian Stretch (oldstable) from official repositories. Stretch is still in the Long Term Support program until around 2022. Dropping support for Python 3.5 means you can't use latest pip on Stretch anymore.

That sounds like a Debian issue though. Or are you suggesting that Python (and by extension Pip) should align their support cycle with Linux distros?

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