Drop support for EOL Python 3.7

[hugovk]

Python 3.7 is EOL since 2023-06-27: https://devguide.python.org/versions/

Dropping 3.7 means the https://pypi.org/project/importlib-metadata and pkg_resources fallbacks can be removed.

[hugovk]

I wonder if this should be kept as a dummy, empty plugins extra, so people can still do pip install pygments[plugins]?

And then remove it in the next major version?

[Anteru]

That's a good question for @jeanas .

[jeanas]

IMHO, we should keep it. It hardly has any maintenance cost. Moreover, if we remove it, it becomes impossible for a library to support both Pygments 2.17 with plugins on Python 3.7 and Pygments 2.18 (if it declares pygments as dependency, it won't get importlib-metadata on Python 3.7 with Pygments 2.17, and if it declares pygments[plugins], pip gives warnings with Pygments 2.18).

[hugovk]

Re-added as a no-op.

[Anteru]

Thanks, high time to revisit this (and also update the link in our docs ...)

@birkenfeld I just checked: RHEL9 ships with 3.9, Ubuntu 22.04 uses 3.10, and Debian Bookworm is Python 3.11. So we could technically drop 3.7 as per our own guidelines (https://pygments.org/docs/contributing/) -- any concerns?

[birkenfeld]

👍

[jeanas]

Thank you!