(That is my humorous way of saying that Python 2.3 is rather old and therefore HIGHEST_PROTOCOL seems like it would be a desirable trade off for most.)
Yeah, what the hell? Even 2.5 is way too old, I generally only support 2.6+ nowadays. If something breaks compatibility with 2.5, no problem there. Hell, Python 3 has been out for years!
No, I'm agreeing with you. I want to transition to 3.4 completely (mypy looks amazing), but there are some small Django libraries (third-party libs) that aren't yet compatible :(
Mypy is indeed amazing, I can't get enough of it. Throw in asyncio and pathlib and you get the reason why I could never go back.
You might look into trying to port the django libs by yourself if you have the skill to do so. 2to3 often gets you really far. If you don't, I'd definitely recommend opening a ticket on the project page. I've done that with a few libs I use, and for a couple of them the maintainers just totally forgot about them and got around to doing the conversion just because I asked.
I did that already, I just have to find some time to do the conversion. The maintainer was kind enough to assist.
How do you use MyPy? I'm particularly worried about two things:
1) If I'm building a library, I can't have MyPy as a requirement, but would still like to use it for the types checks. Is there a way to omit the import when distributing your library?
2) Can it only check parts of an application? Maybe I have a big Django app and don't want it to static-check Django and all the other imports every time, for example.