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Python 3.6+ is required to run EasyBuild v5.0.0

EasyBuild 5.0 requires Python >= 3.6 to run.

EasyBuild will not run with any Python older than 3.6, including Python 2.7.

Trying to run EasyBuild with a Python version that is too old will result in an error:

ERROR: No compatible 'python' command found via $PATH (EasyBuild requires Python 3.6+)

Python 2.7 has been end-of-life since 1 Jan 2020, and dropping compatibility with Python 2.7 and Python 3.5 enabled some significant code cleanup (see easybuild-framework PR #4229).

The results of the 6th EasyBuild User Survey (2022) show that the impact of this breaking change on the EasyBuild community should be very limited, since:

  • Only ~13% of survey participants were still running EasyBuild on top of Python 2.7;
  • No survey participants reported using Python 3.5;
  • Over 85% of survey participants reported using Python 3.6, or a more recent version of Python 3;
  • Only 3 out of 118 survey participants (~2.5%) reported that dropping support for running EasyBuild on top of Python 2 would be problematic for them;

Along with actively removing code that was only required to retain compatibility with Python 2.7 or 3.5, the easybuild.tools.py2vs3 module that was introduced to facilitate supporting both Python 2.7 and Python 3 has been deprecated (see also here).