From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Jacob Champion <jacob.champion@enterprisedb.com>
cc: PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: PG20 Minimum Dependency Thread
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Comments: In-reply-to Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
	message dated "Thu, 18 Jun 2026 18:26:06 -0400"
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Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2026 19:35:14 -0400
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I wrote:
> Now maybe we can finesse that, like "you can build PL/Python and
> associated contrib modules with Python >= X, but if you want to
> run these optional tests, they require Python >= Y".  Not sure
> how comfortable I am with that.  I definitely don't want to get
> into a situation where we require buildfarm owners to have
> Python >= Y installed, because then we will not have any testing
> that proves we didn't break the other part.  (So we'd need a
> runtime check to skip these tests on too-old Python.)

Granting that our pytest framework should silently give up if
Python is too old, the decision of which minimum version to target
is really kind of independent of what PL/Python does.  It becomes
a tradeoff of ease of coding versus "how many platforms do you want
this test to be able to run on?".  I have no insight on what the
coding benefits are of different Python versions, but I do have
this freshly-scraped data about how many buildfarm members are
reporting which major Python version:

      3 3.5
     39 3.6
      5 3.7
      5 3.8
     39 3.9
      6 3.10
     21 3.11
     45 3.12
     48 3.13
     12 3.14
      2 3.15

Just eyeing that, it seems like 3.9 or 3.11 would be choices that
still allow most animals to run the tests.

			regards, tom lane