Bump the minimum supported Python version to 3.6.8

Python 3.2 is no longer tested by the buildfarm, and there are only a
handful of buildfarm animals running versions older than 3.6, which
itself went end-of-life in 2021. Python 3.6.8 is the default version
shipped in RHEL8, so that seems like a reasonable baseline for PG18.

Now that we use the Python Limited API as of 0793ab810, older versions
of Python should continue functioning for users of PL/Python in
particular, so soften the language from "required" to "supported".

Wording by Tom Lane. Separate from the review of the patch itself,
several people provided input on the choice of cutoff: Christoph Berg,
Devrim Gündüz, Florents Tselai, Jelte Fennema-Nio, and Renan Alves
Fonseca. Thank you!

Suggested-by: Tom Lane <[email protected]>
Reviewed-by: Peter Eisentraut <[email protected]>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/16098.1745079444%40sss.pgh.pa.us

diff --git a/doc/src/sgml/installation.sgml b/doc/src/sgml/installation.sgml
index 077bcc207595950d8e44acc7e57d5310c52ef4a0..e7ffb942bbd3988db056a442403d9e73562e73db 100644 (file)
--- a/doc/src/sgml/installation.sgml
+++ b/doc/src/sgml/installation.sgml
@@ -241,7 +241,7 @@
       language, you need a <productname>Python</productname>
       installation with the header files and
       the <application>sysconfig</application> module.  The minimum
-      required version is <productname>Python</productname> 3.2.
+      supported version is <productname>Python</productname> 3.6.8.
      </para>
 
      <para>