Hi all, Python 3.10 reached end of life on 2026-10-01 and the Python devguide now lists it as unsupported, and in addition, pyarrow (major dependency for pyiceberg) no longer ships 3.10 wheels with 26.x.x, which means users installing it get pyarrow 25.x.x while users installing 3.11+ get 26.x.x (this would also allow us to bump the floor from >=18.0.0 to >=26.0.0). One more bonus is deleting some code that gates the version, specifically pyiceberg/io/pyarrow.py L459 and pyiceberg/io/pyarrow.py L561.
I would like to drop 3.10 and set `requires-python to >=3.11`, and raise the floor version on some libraries that rely on 3.10, as well as remove those version gates that aren't needed. This can all live in one PR since it's tightly coupled changes. Users on 3.10 can stay on the last release that supports it, the same way this was handled 3.9 last year and 3.8 before that. Thanks, Orest
