v0.13.0 and v0.14.0 Roadmap

[BrianJKoopman]

Following the recent release of v0.12.0, I wanted to post a general roadmap for what we plan on doing in the near future in v0.13.0 and v0.14.0, mostly focused on changes that may affect ocs users.

v0.13.0

• Drop Python 3.7, 3.8, and 3.9 support.
• Formally add Python 3.13 and 3.14 support.

These old Python versions have been end-of-life since October 2025 or earlier. We appreciate ocs users might be running on old systems (ourselves included), but supporting end-of-life Python versions gets more difficult as time goes on, and we wanted to make users aware of the future plans to drop support.

Moving forward we'll likely drop support as versions go end-of-life. That said, since the Ubuntu LTS releases tend to skip every other version, this might in practice mean we support 3.10 until 3.11 is dropped, no promises though.

As for more modern Python versions. I expect ocs works there already, but we'll add formal testing to our GitHub Actions soon. In practice, we're just now preparing to be running on 3.12. If you're already running with 3.13 or 3.14, feel free to let us know how it's going.

v0.14.0

• Begin work on replacing crossbar.

Crossbar.io has been out of business for a while now. While there has been some recent activity on the core wamp router, we're motivated to replace the crossbar server.

I can't go into details on what that will look like at the moment, only that we will aim to minimize disruption to existing agents and that we'll clearly communicate what changes are needed when upgrading. We'll likely be trying to leverage other popular tooling for RPC and PubSub that are out there, but in the telescope control systems world there isn't a clear winner for these, so we'll be weighing our options.

I'll try to answer any questions you might have. Otherwise, keep your eye on the release announcements, and happy observing!