Add support for Python 3.8-3.10, drop EOL 2.7-3.5

[hugovk]

• Add support for Python 3.8-3.10

• Drop EOL 2.7-3.5

cycle	latest	release	eol
3.6	3.6.15	2016-12-23	2021-12-23
3.5	3.5.10	2015-09-30	2020-09-13
3.4	3.4.10	2014-03-16	2019-03-18
3.3	3.3.7	2012-09-29	2017-09-29
2.7	2.7.18	2010-07-03	2020-01-01

They're also little used. Here's the pip installs for python-multipart from PyPI for October 2021:

category	percent	downloads
3.8	37.90%	438,296
3.7	29.96%	346,472
null	14.95%	172,916
3.9	13.20%	152,662
3.6	3.07%	35,522
3.10	0.80%	9,197
2.7	0.12%	1,404
3.5	0.01%	59
3.11	0.00%	6
3.4	0.00%	2
Total		1,156,536

Source: pip install -U pypistats && pypistats python_minor python-multipart --last-month

This means we can upgrade Python syntax and simplify imports, and remove six.

[andrew-d]

cc @tomchristie as one of the major users; it looks like Starlette only supports 3.6+ as well, so this seems reasonable; what do you think?

[Kludex]

This would be cool. :)

[hugovk]

Starlette has now dropped support for EOL Python 3.6 as well:

https://pypi.org/project/starlette/

[lovelydinosaur]

Looks okay to me. I'd typically nudge folks towards smaller sets of pull requests, but that'd probably be just adding unnecessary work at this point.

Project probably needs a new dedicated maintainer tho. (I'd rather not be a primary maintainer on this project at this point - too many spinning plates)

[Kludex]

Project probably needs a new dedicated maintainer tho. (I'd rather not be a primary maintainer on this project at this point - too many spinning plates)

Can I help here?

[lovelydinosaur]

Well... possibly, tho you do already manage several different projects.
But your call.

[Kludex]

@hugovk Can you please enable the pipeline on pull requests on this PR?

[Kludex]

Well... possibly, tho you do already manage several different projects. But your call.

I want to try to address the current issues.

[hugovk]

@hugovk Can you please enable the pipeline on pull requests on this PR?

Unfortunately not, only people with write access can do that.

Fortunately, I had enabled it for my fork and you can see the passing builds here: https://github.com/hugovk/python-multipart/actions

[Kludex]

On the top of this file there's a "on: [push]".

Can you replace by this: https://github.com/encode/starlette/blob/bc61505faef15b673bf4bf65db4927daa354d6b8/.github/workflows/test-suite.yml#L4 ?

[hugovk]

I'm personally strongly against adding this, it would have prevented me testing the CI on my fork and is an extra impediment to contributing.

https://github.com/hugovk/python-multipart/actions

Unless I edited the yml in my fork, and then remembered to revert it before creating a PR.
Or I can submit a PR on my branch first to check it passes -> extra impediment.

Or I can develop on my master -> not a best practice, we should use feature branches, and I only have a single master -> extra impediment.

The fact it's tested on upstream and on the fork isn't such a big deal: the testing is split between two different accounts and therefore doesn't use up any extra quota/time from any single account.

CIs allow us to test on a much larger matrix of Python versions and operating systems, much more than is possible locally and sometimes faster too. I sometimes avoid contributing to projects with no/broken CI.

I believe the use of CIs are of huge benefit for software quality and development, especially when so easy nowadays; Travis CI really revolutionised this, remember how hard testing was before. We should rather encourage people to test on their own forks before creating PRs.

Fail fast: shorten the time to finding a failure, enable quicker loops of incremental development.

[Kludex]

You're not against this. You're against GitHub blocking first time contributors for running their pipeline.

There's a setting to allow old GitHub users (3 months old ?) to not be blocked.

[hugovk]

You're not against this. You're against GitHub blocking first time contributors for running their pipeline.

I don't mind that bit too much :)

---

Consider this workflow:

I come along and fork the repo and enable the CI on my fork.

I create a feature branch add-3.10.

I push my feature branch to my fork and check the CI.

I want the CI to test my changes on all supported Python versions (and possibly on several operating systems).

If it fails, I'll iterate: fix, push, repeat.

(This actually happened, see the first few failures as I iterated: https://github.com/hugovk/python-multipart/actions)

Once it passes, I can create a PR here, knowing that when the CI is enabled for the PR (we're 10 months and counting here), I'm confident it will pass and there's no surprises because I didn't test Python 3.7 or so on.

However, if we have these branch restrictions:

on:
  push:
    branches: ["master"]
  pull_request:
    branches: ["master"]

The CI won't build for me.

My options:

• Don't test on the CI, hope for the best when the PR runs here
• Edit the file and remove the restrictions, then before submitting the PR, remember to re-add the restrictions
• Develop in my master branch - not recommended, you can only work on one thing

All this applies even if I'm a second-time contributor.

[Kludex]

Hi @tomchristie @andrew-d Can we proceed here?

Also, I have bandwidth to maintain this project. 👀

[hugovk]

Thanks for the merge! Please see #51 for the 2022 edition :)

[Kludex]

Thanks @hugovk 🙏