Drop support for Python 3.8 (10/2024)

[afuetterer]

Python 3.8 reaches EOL in 10/2024.

Refs:

• https://devguide.python.org/versions/#supported-versions
• Drop support for Python 3.6 and 3.7? #648

[MyPyDavid]

yes, this is a good one.
Maybe we should spread this info into the community so that instance admins can do (or prepare for) an upgrade. Except for upgrading the Python installation on the OS there shouldn't be any troubles AFAIK..

[afuetterer]

No more security patches should be argument enough, right?

[jochenklar]

I think we should support 3.8 as long as we can. I think when we ditched 3.6 and 3.7 it was beacause we wanted to use pyproject.toml. Updating the VM where RDMO is running is troublesome, and it will keep people from updating RDMO.

[MyPyDavid]

I've heard something about uv from @jochenklar ;) .. Guess the EOL 3.8 can be dropped now right??

[afuetterer]

I don't see the connection of these topics. But I am still in favor of dropping EOL versions.

This topic will re-appear every time, when a new major versions is released and an older version is dropped. The RDMO dependencies will then continuously drop their support for EOL versions. Meaning RDMO is stuck with old versions of dependencies.

Ref: #742

[MyPyDavid]

because of this

          We can drop it. Now that I discovered `uv` for Python installs I am less worried about this.

Originally posted by @jochenklar in #1206 (comment)

and this rdmorganiser/rdmo-docs#56 ;)

For Django I think that RDMO will upgrade only from LTS(4.2) to LTS(5.2).

[afuetterer]

Okay, so this means green light for dropping 3.8?

How about the versioning of RDMO? Is this something for the release 2.3.0? Or do you consider this a breaking change?

[MyPyDavid]

However, after potentially dropping 3.8 (@jochenklar), we should still be testing against a minimum python version right?
Do we bump it to 3.9 or 3.10 already?

[jochenklar]

Well we should test 3.9 and 3.13 (which I think breaks now, but this is for another issue). See https://endoflife.date/python

[afuetterer]

I can do this. 3.13 was not installable recently due to the large number of dependencies that need to be 3.13-ready as well.

[jochenklar]

Awesome, thanks! Yes, I get some errors with brew on the Mac, which is rolling release (that's why I started to look into uv ...). We probably just need to wait until the dependencies are fixed.

[MyPyDavid]

we should then also add the attribute requires-python = '>=3.9' to the pyproject.toml

[afuetterer]

we should then also add the attribute requires-python = '>=3.9' to the pyproject.toml

I know. :)