Hey everyone, With Python 3.8 reaching end-of-life in October, I've started the work of removing support in the Beam repository. The aim is to target Beam release 2.60.0 for this, since the expected release cut date is on October 2nd, 2024. The start of this effort is at https://github.com/apache/beam/pull/32283/, updating our GitHub Actions workflows. For many workflows like our unit test suites this is not a large change; the Python version matrix simply omits 3.8 and runs on the remaining python versions as expected. This is more complicated for a number of workflows that currently only run on 3.8 or both 3.8 and 3.12, as GitHub will not run the updated actions in the main repository until the PR updating them is submitted. This can already be seen in some workflow runs on the PR where Python 3.8 is no longer being installed in the runner environment, leading to failures.
The current plan is to do as much validation of the new workflow files as I can before the above PR is submitted (hopefully the week after Beam Summit,) then focus on getting any potential workflow breakages resolved before removing the core Python 3.8 support from the package. There may be some instability with our workflows, and I will try my best to resolve things as they pop up. This is the first Python version to have support dropped since we migrated to GitHub Actions, so there's going to be a decent amount of trial and error as we navigate this. That said, if you notice problems please let me know! Either file a standalone issue and tag me on it (@jrmccluskey) or leave a comment on https://github.com/apache/beam/issues/31192 so I can take a look. Thanks, Jack McCluskey -- Jack McCluskey SWE - DataPLS PLAT/ Dataflow ML RDU jrmcclus...@google.com
