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But it is not broken yet.

Does that mean we should keep publishing wheels nobody needs until our oldest supported numpy is >=2.6 ?

nobody needs

We don't know that. There is always one user somewhere that somehow still needs it.

well, numpy, scipy, pandas, matplotlib (to name a few) have already dropped it, so I have serious doubts that our users are numerous enough to justify keeping these.

Also, I'm proposing this only for 8.1+, and if anyone still relies on astropy upgrades for this platform:

• they'll still get the 8.0.x series
• after that, they can probably still build from source
• conda-forge users might still get further updates (although I suspect conda-forge itself won't be supporting it much longer)

Given that even numpy are dropping it and other projects already have, I think we should probably just drop it so my vote is +1

We don't know that. There is always one user somewhere that somehow still needs it.

I just queried the download data from the last week, limited to the 1000 most downloaded artifacts over this period, using https://github.com/ofek/pypinfo

here's the relevant subset

| 6.1.7       | astropy-6.1.7-cp310-cp310-win32.whl.metadata                                                                                | Windows     |             44 |
| 6.1.7       | astropy-6.1.7-cp310-cp310-win32.whl                                                                                         | Windows     |             44 |
| 6.0.1       | astropy-6.0.1-cp39-cp39-win32.whl                                                                                           | Windows     |              8 |
| 6.0.1       | astropy-6.0.1-cp39-cp39-win32.whl.metadata                                                                                  | Windows     |              6 |
| 5.0         | astropy-5.0-cp39-cp39-win32.whl                                                                                             | Windows     |              6 |
| 5.0         | astropy-5.0-cp39-cp39-win32.whl.metadata                                                                                    | Windows     |              6 |
| 7.2.0       | astropy-7.2.0-cp311-abi3-win32.whl.metadata                                                                                 | Windows     |              4 |
| 5.2.2       | astropy-5.2.2-cp38-cp38-win32.whl                                                                                           | Windows     |              2 |
| 5.2.2       | astropy-5.2.2-cp38-cp38-win32.whl.metadata                                                                                  | Windows     |              1 |
| 4.1         | astropy-4.1-cp38-cp38-win32.whl                                                                                             | Windows     |              1 |
| 4.1         | astropy-4.1-cp38-cp38-win32.whl.metadata                                                                                    | Windows     |              1 |

(this is out of 514,362 downloads, combining our 1000 most popular artifacts)

This represents about 0.2% of downloads, and 96% of these are for Python versions we dropped almost 2 years ago at the latest.

| 7.2.0       | astropy-7.2.0-cp311-abi3-win32.whl.metadata    | Windows     |              4 |

That is 3 more than what I predicted. 😆

Well, if I am outvoted, then I shall 🤐