It's impressive how my pip version seems to always be out of date.
On the other hand I would love to use the shiny new feature, but explaining it to my manager would be like talking to a tree.
Versions ≥ 18 refer to the years 2018+; they don't refer to the number of versions released anymore.
When I mentioned "the numbers" I wasn't hinting at unit test coverage. I was giving examples as to what the numbers could be. Obviously OP should ask lots of questions about all of the software running on a legacy kernel.
TBH I think the main thing about that release, for me, was the introduction of context managers ("with"). I don't remember any particular breakage but I wasn't doing sysadmin at the time, maybe there is something in the bowels of redhat that relied on some broken behaviour...
I never understood the point of hiring a full team for at least 6 months just for that. The only explanation I can find is that the project manager was clueless about Python.
Just run `pip install --upgrade pip` every month and you will be fine.
Python binary packages are a bit of a kludge, they take a binary built on a base platform like CentOS 5, and use tools like patchelf to take all the libraries that they dynamically link against and re-wrap them in a new package.
Until about a year ago, CentOS 5 was the newest base platform available. So if your library needed a glibc feature or some other library feature from the past decade you were SoL.