[PyQt] RFQ on PyQt End-of-Life Policy

[Dark Penguin]

>> I also remove the previous wheels from PyPI but I’ve never been sure
>> that that’s the right thing to do.
>
> Matter of personal taste, but I would leave everything on PyPI
> once it's an official release.

I may be mistaken due to being a Python beginner, but wouldn't removing
wheels break virtualenv "freeze" functionality?.. Or at least cause
"different packages at different time points". Because "freeze" tries to
restore all packages to the exact saved version.

As far as I understand, it is a very common practice to use "freeze" to
restore all the environment to the exact same configuration as it was
before, which may sometimes be essential for development and packaging
purposes. At the very least, that would cause additional inconvenience
for developers, maintainers and CI/CD people all around, who can not use
their "previously working" configuration due to PyQt being unforgivingly
progressive. :)


Also, the latest releases might probably be generally oriented towards
the latest Ubuntu, but we also have Debian Stable, which may not even
have a reasonably modern C++ compiler. And I'm still on oldstable, where
you can't even install PyQt5 from pip at all due to the absence of
sip>=4.19.1 which apparently does not have a wheel for Python 3.4 (what
happened to supporting all Python versions?.. And shouldn't PyQt 5.8.0
depend on an older version of sip?).

Of course, I don't suggest that supporting oldstable makes sense, and I
support the decision to drop support for old Python versions. But I
think that simply keeping the old wheels could help avoid various
problems in a lot of corner cases. I would also ask to keep the old
sources - if not on the website, then at least on some FTP archive where
they can be found if you really need them; however, I can't come up with
a good, justifiable example of a specific corner case that would benefit
from this.

One possible case is the situation with the Android NDK:
- Google does something questionable like removing GCC from the NDK;
- something in my project does not compile with Clang just yet;
- recent PyQt versions dropped support for GCC or older NDK;
- I really need to just keep things working for a while, but my new
contributors can't even build my project because the old wheels are not
in pip anymore.

This particular example may not be very good, but the idea is that
simply not deleting something seemingly useless may give more options to
people struggling with some unexpected problems - even if it's just
someone using outdated software and "unsupported and not recommended,
but still possible" solutions.


-- 
darkpenguin