Drop support for python < 3.10

[dcbaker]

It's time, there are nice features added by 3.8, 3.9, and 3.10. We're also forced to pin mypy, meaning we don't get access to mypy and typeshed fixes.

Closes: #14326

[eli-schwartz]

Yeah, oops, looks like we missed the boat on adding a deprecation warning in the last cycle....

[dcbaker]

Oops, I missed updating the docs about supported versions

[jpakkane]

FTR at the time of writing Debian oldstable has 3.11 and Ubuntu 22/04 has 3.10. The number of people still depending on 3.8 is likely to be vanishingly small.

[eli-schwartz]

FTR at the time of writing Debian oldstable has 3.11 and Ubuntu 22/04 has 3.10. The number of people still depending on 3.8 is likely to be vanishingly small.

See #14326 (comment) :)

RHEL has 3.9 by default, for example.

[bonzini]

RHEL has 3.9 by default, for example.

You don't need to care about it. RHEL users can use whatever they want, only RHEL developers/packagers might need to use the 3.9 interpreter in. But RHEL 9 packages are not going to need Meson 1.11 or 1.12 (out in summer 2026).

[dcbaker]

Updated to target 1.11 instead of 1.10.1

[dcbaker]

You don't need to care about it. RHEL users can use whatever they want, only RHEL developers/packagers might need to use the 3.9 interpreter in. But RHEL 9 packages are not going to need Meson 1.11 or 1.12 (out in summer 2026).

One RHEL developer/packager I know said "Solving issues like this is why the pay me the (not so) big bucks"

[nirbheek]

Actually, Xcode on macOS ships with Python 3.9, which is why that's the minimum Python version required by GStreamer. It would be good if we could still support that. The process of installing Meson on macOS is just pip3 install meson right now, and after this it would involve downloading Python manually, or installing Homebrew for Python.

[jpakkane]

And presumably Apple will not give any information if or when they update their Python version?

[eli-schwartz]

Actually, Xcode on macOS ships with Python 3.9, which is why that's the minimum Python version required by GStreamer. It would be good if we could still support that. The process of installing Meson on macOS is just pip3 install meson right now, and after this it would involve downloading Python manually, or installing Homebrew for Python.

This is an excellent point which highlights why we don't want to unnecessarily raise versions (and avoided it for 3.8 / 3.9), and also why we need to genuinely, correctly, offer a proper release cycle deprecation. Added to the list in #14326

Unfortunately there is no way we can use e.g. Structural Pattern Matching¹ but also support 3.9, that's exactly why we are having a conversation about bumping minimums now that this particular new python version offers genuinely compelling new language features. Our choices are:

• block on waiting for $CORP timeline (we have no insight into their timeline)
• Do The Thing™

Footnotes

1. it is theoretically possible to implement a compiler that takes py 3.10 code and spits out desugared, expanded, uglified 3.9 code. Someone did this for f-strings via the "future-fstrings" package. ↩