Updates the release workflow to support python 3.11 and MacOS arm64.

[cheqianh]

Description

This PR adds support for wheels on Python 3.11 and MacOS-arm64.

In detail, this PR:

1. Adds wheels for Python 3.11.
2. Adds wheels for MacOS-arm64.
3. Drops support for wheels built with Python 3.6 to 3.8.
4. Updates required dependencies and build tools.

Test

1. A successful wheel build workflow from my fork can be found at: https://github.com/cheqianh/ion-python/actions/runs/7880967937.
2. All tests have passed on GitHub Actions

By submitting this pull request, I confirm that my contribution is made under the terms of the Apache 2.0 license.

[rmarrowstone]

I realize that we were already using 3.10 for the python version for building the wheels, but let's make sure we understand what's going on there.

[rmarrowstone]

What is the relationship between this python 3.10 setup step and the built wheels? Is 3.10 used to build wheels for all the versions? Are we only building wheels for 3.10?

[tgregg]

And why not 3.11?

[cheqianh]

This python version will be used for setting up virtual environment and install dependencies including cibuildwheel. We used 3.10 back then because cibuildwheel=2.4.0 only supported wheels for python versions up 3.10 so I used the same version as it's the latest version of python we supported to build wheels.

To avoid the confusion, I updated the PR to use general python3 command to let tasks use the default python versions that these images are using. For example, MacOs 14 is using python 3.11 and Ubuntu-latest is using python 3.10. But both versions are tested in our main test workflow.

[cheqianh]

A successful workflow test without python 3.10 setup is available in my fork - https://github.com/cheqianh/ion-python/actions/runs/7891635687

[rmarrowstone]

Well that still doesn't really answer the question. I dug into the docs and the answer is that the CIBW flags control which architectures and python versions one builds for. I added a comment to the current skip setup because I think we need to be explicit about we include not exclude there. It would also make it clearer what is going on.

[cheqianh]

Okay, will include this change in the next commit.

[cheqianh]

Is 3.10 used to build wheels for all the versions?

No, cibuildwheel will build wheels using different python versions respectively

Are we only building wheels for 3.10?

Nope.

[rmarrowstone]

Prefer explicit including instead of accepting the cibuildwheel defaults and skipping some. That way we know that we are only building for arch/python version combinations that we have tested for and it won't change with cibuildwheel.

[rmarrowstone]

Please also add a comment about what these apparently arcane flags mean for the next dev that has to change this.

[cheqianh]

Added a commit to

1. Use the specific arch names instead of alias "auto",
2. Use the specific python versions 3.9 to 3.11
3. Add a link to the cibuildwheel flag document

I tried to add python 3.12 but the build failed due to a dependency issue. I'll open a new issue to track the 3.12 build issue.

[cheqianh]

Opened a new issue for adding 3.12 to the build workflow - #339

[rmarrowstone]

Please add comment. It is really non-obvious that "cp39" means "C-Python 3.9".

[rmarrowstone]

I mean... until it is, of course! ;-)