The Apache OpenDAL project will drop the language support for the Python which version is < 3.11 in 0.46.0

[Zheaoli]

The OpenDAL project will migrate the Python binding build process to the Python Stable ABI. This means that we reduce our binary size and increase our API stability.

After the test, we decide to choose Python 3.11 as our base version in the future. In another world, we will drop the support for version < 3.11 after v0.46.0.

FYI #4623

[3ok]

Thank you for the announcement. While I appreciate the efforts to improve OpenDAL Python bindings, I'm worried this might hinder project adoption since Python 3.11 is a fairly recent version.

I tried to take a look at downloads statistics from the PyPI public Google BigQuery dataset for this year and it seems like most of the users (about 50%) are using Python 3.10.

[Xuanwo]

Thanks a lot for the feedback. We pick up 3.11 since we depends on the Buffer introduced since 3.11. I'll take a look if it's possible to support old python versions by adding a fallback.

[Xuanwo]

I tried but failed. We have to decide between:

• Remove the PyBuffer optimization that adds an extra copy for read/write operations.

OR

• Increase the MSPV to 3.11

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Why we need to decide now: We are nearing the 10GiB package limit on pypi. Our application is unlikely to be approved soon: pypi/support#4001

[3ok]

Oh thank you for the additional context.

Depending on how close we are to the 10 GiB package limitation on PyPI, I'm wondering if it would be more practical to start by dropping for Python version < 3.10 for a version or two, before ultimately dropping Python 3.10 and using the PyBuffer introduced in Python 3.11.