Hi, informal poll: how would folks feel about no longer releasing Pants with Python 3.7 in Pants 2.14+ and instead adding 3.10? This is only for running Pants itself - does not impact your own code (feel free to comment)

It would be great to wind up with a policy out of this poll / discussion so that there is something folks can rely on over time, i.e "We support whatever Python supports." (unlikely) or "We support Python latest stable major X though X-2", or whatever rule.

Agreed. Although, the plan the whole time was for this to be irrelevant by distributing Pants as a binary

We'll still have the issue though presumably. The current crop of Pants plugin developers like new features alot. The ability to use them will be even more locked down once we embed a single version. Happy the day we embed, probably not so much 3 years later. We'll still need a policy I guess unless contributors can stomach stablity for not new features any longer.

Personally as a user, I feel that it is harder to always have to keep older versions around just to run a tool. As various Linux distros update to the latest stable releases of Python it becomes onerous to have to get a special older version to run a build tool. I know it's not particularly simple, but a policy of something like latest - 2 previous ongoing would generally resolve this. And the people who are affected by something like that are more likely to have an easy path to a newer python than an older one. It's quite unfortunate when a single

apt upgrade

can cause an important part of your build process to just stop working and leave you looking for a solution to a problem you didn't even know you had

Thanks, Steve! I generally like the policy of latest & previous 2. That gives us clear direction when Pants 3.11 comes out soon

I agree with John that a formal policy is a good goal here. Let's put this to a vote of the community, and upon their approval put it to a vote of the maintainers and publish. That way people have maximum notice/lead-time that change is coming.

Pants 2.14 is likely a month away, so I think we're fine on the timeline. But should get it rolling sooner Re a formal vote to the community, what do you mean? We have the informal poll w/ unanimous feedback. Maybe it's enough for maintainers to also reach consensus, then we announce in pants-devel email group w/ opportunity for pushback?

The poll was re a particular version rather than a generalizable rule. I think it's worth polling the community to document consensus on the latter.

How about poll here, then announce prospective rule on devel

like a new poll on the proposed rule?

Yup.