Raise minimum Python version?

[Manuel Jacob]

On 2020-05-21 01:59, Gregory Szorc wrote:
> On Tue, May 19, 2020 at 6:24 AM Manuel Jacob <me at manueljacob.de> wrote:
> [snip]
> 
>> Alternatively, we could drop Python 2 support completely.
>> 
> 
> I'd love to do this too. But Python 3 on Windows is still a bit shaky 
> and
> we probably need another release before we can drop Python 2 
> completely. I
> really, really, really wish this weren't the case.
> 
> I'll try to find time in the next week to work on patches to the stable
> branch so we can publish working Python 3 Windows installers. Hopefully 
> if
> we get 5.4.1 working on Windows on Python 3 we can drop support for 
> Python
> 2 after the 5.5 release (making 5.6 the first Python 3 only release).

Is there any chance we can get the patches in before 5.5rc0 (around July 
16th)?

Even with the patches, the schedule would be tight for dropping Python 2 
after 5.5. Still, I would appreciate if we find some way to do it. When 
working on fixing the stdio streams behavior, it was very hard to keep 
both Python 2 and Python 3 in mind. I like the detective work, but it's 
not very satisfying, given that Python 2 support will be dropped 
eventually.

I can help resolving any blockers for dropping Python 2. I've created 
https://bz.mercurial-scm.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6365 for tracking blockers. 
I'm definitively not an expert for Windows (especially installers), so 
I'll focus on everything else before.