VPP/PythonVersionPolicy

Python Version policy.

With the sunsetting of Python 2 on Jan 1, 2020, [1] The VPP project has migrated the Python related tooling to run under Python3.

As a practical matter, at the time of this writing (March 2020), we support both Python 3.6 and Python 3.8 as they are the versions distributed with the supported OS platforms.

While we do not support running the tools under Python 2, we understand that community members may still be running environments using Python2. To accommodate these users, we may accept Python2 changesets with accompanying unit tests that pass in the CI. Since we are no longer running any tests under Python2, these users should understand that their changes may break at any time in the future and are strongly recommended to rework their tools to run under Python3.

Python is used in VPP in the following areas:

• in the `Syphon` process for generating doxygen content.
• in vppapigen, used to generate the binary api and api language bindings.
• vpp_papi, the Python api wrappers.
• vpp_config, the vpp configuration tool.
• per-patch test framework, found in ./test