Bump the minimum supported Python version to 3.6.8
authorJacob Champion <jchampion@postgresql.org>
Tue, 29 Apr 2025 20:04:19 +0000 (13:04 -0700)
committerJacob Champion <jchampion@postgresql.org>
Tue, 29 Apr 2025 20:04:19 +0000 (13:04 -0700)
commit45363fca6372a04e90d1c2628c3cbfe8894b811b
tree8d9305a31d522e3851353ce42719856a0b9b6b25
parenteec34099c3bfe0ed4b33e77f38cab3b221cd3b37
Bump the minimum supported Python version to 3.6.8

Python 3.2 is no longer tested by the buildfarm, and there are only a
handful of buildfarm animals running versions older than 3.6, which
itself went end-of-life in 2021. Python 3.6.8 is the default version
shipped in RHEL8, so that seems like a reasonable baseline for PG18.

Now that we use the Python Limited API as of 0793ab810, older versions
of Python should continue functioning for users of PL/Python in
particular, so soften the language from "required" to "supported".

Wording by Tom Lane. Separate from the review of the patch itself,
several people provided input on the choice of cutoff: Christoph Berg,
Devrim Gündüz, Florents Tselai, Jelte Fennema-Nio, and Renan Alves
Fonseca. Thank you!

Suggested-by: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Reviewed-by: Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/16098.1745079444%40sss.pgh.pa.us
doc/src/sgml/installation.sgml