The changes look good to me, and the tests are passing. I guess one question may be whether we want to error out immediately when running in 2.6, or just give a warning and try to run in any case, since at least the way I understood the announcement as merely withdrawing "official support".

With #5299 merged (which depends on functool32 which is python 2.7 and later only) I think we have broken 2.6 support fully. This should not go into 1.5.x which should still work with 2.6

You're right, Python 2.6 won't run current master. 👍

~~We may also want to consider a friendly error message on Python 2.6 from setup.py similar to the one in __init__.py. No point in installing it only to find out it won't work later. As it stands, the user gets:

Running functools32-3.2.3-2/setup.py -q bdist_egg --dist-dir /tmp/easy_install-rNTUH7/functools32-3.2.3-2/egg-dist-tmp-ot6OvI
This backport is for Python 2.7 only.

which refers to functools32, which might lead to a bug report to us. Better to just say "matplotlib requires 2.7, 3.3, 3.4 or 3.5" and be done with it.~~

EDIT: Sorry, I missed the check in setupext.py. That's great.

back-ported to v2.0.x as 1866a8c

can you at least tell me which version i should install if i do want py2.6?

The 1.4 series is the last versions to officially support python 2.6.

There was a loing discusion about this in 2015 http://matplotlib.1069221.n5.nabble.com/Matplotlib-devel-supported-python-versions-tt46154.html and no one volunteered to take care of 2.6 compatible branch so it got dropped.

@joranbeasley I have deleted your comment. Insulting core maintainers (who are volunteers) is not condusive to us taking your concerns seriously. Please be civil in our channels.