Deprecation warning for python 3.8 #2520
Merged
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Closes #2476.
As outlined in the linked issue, according to our docs we have a policy of dropping support for python versions after end-of-life, following an additional 6-month grace period.
I don't think we need to drop support for 3.8 any time soon. We don't really need to stop until it becomes too cumbersome to continue to support, which for now it's not. But this will likely change as time goes on - several (maybe most?) of our dependencies don't support 3.8 in their latest releases, so we will probably encounter issues at some point with this mismatch.
I think it will be good to get this deprecation warning in now. It doesn't commit us to any particular timeline, but gives people warning that if they will need to upgrade their python version to continue getting the latest version of Splink. If we start warning now, we should be giving people plenty of notice to be able to manage that upgrade. Then when the time comes that 3.8 becomes difficult to keep supporting we can (potentially) just drop it, as affected users should have had plenty of notice by that point.