Language support: Python, Ruby, and PHP versions after the OS update

In the near future, we are going to roll out our yearly OS update. It will bring a lot of software packages to a recent version - and discontinue older versions. Today, we will give you an overview of how this applies to our platform support for Python, Ruby, and PHP.

Python

The newest and greatest Python stuff will be there: we will add platform support for Python 3.3 and Python 3.4. We have also tuned the versions of related packages like virtualenv, pip, and setuptools so that everything will play nicely together.

We will discontinue the platform support Python 2.4, Python 2.5, and Python 3.1. Supported versions will be: Python 2.6, Python 2.7 (default Python 2), Python 3.2, Python 3.3 (default Python 3), and Python 3.4.

Version 2.4 has been discontinued upstream since 2008 and does not receive security updates any longer. Running it as platform package seems not to be a good idea anymore. However, since Python 2.4 is still involved in a few applications running Plone 3.x, we encourage those users to either go for a newer Plone version or switch to a self-compiled Python 2.4.

We see version 2.5 being very rarely used on our platform and, due to the fact that we still have 2.6 and 2.7 on board, we will drop platform support for Python 2.5. Further, upon its last release in 2011 it has already been said that no security issues will be fixed in 2.5 any longer. We encourage users that still rely on this version to upgrade or use a self-compiled Python 2.5.

Further, we will discontinue platform support for Python 3.1 as we provide versions 3.2, 3.3, and 3.4. Users of Python 3.1 may use a self-compiled version of Python 3.1 or migrate their projects to use a newer version of Python.

Ruby

We have added Ruby 2.0 to our platform. We will discontinue platform support for Ruby 1.8.7. Supported versions will be Ruby 1.9 (default) and Ruby 2.0.

Support for Ruby 1.8 has been discontinued upstream, which is why we will not provide it on platform level any longer.

PHP

We will discontinue the platform support for PHP 5.4. The only version supported will be PHP 5.5.

Users of PHP 5.4 may have to adjust their application code. According to the PHP core developers, however, migrating projects from PHP 5.4 to PHP 5.5 should not be too much work since there are only a handful of backward incompatible changes in PHP 5.5.