Plans for dropping support for python 3.7, 3.8 and 3.9

[CompRhys]

https://devguide.python.org/versions/

Python 3.7 and 3.8 are already end of life and python 3.9 will join them shortly in October.

There are several code health improvements that were introduced in 3.10 such as | for typing or strict in zips. Key packages such as numpy have already dropped support for 3.9 and so it seems like overextending to continue to support end of life versions here.

Is there any plan to bump the minimum version from 3.7?

(enquiry triggered because all tests in develop currently need cueq to run due to import issue and cueq is already 3.10+)

[ilyes319]

I think we are going to remove 3.7 but keep 3.8 as i see a lot of users still using 3.8, including HPCs that have not updated from it (even though I agree it is quite outdated).

[CompRhys]

I would strongly encourage dropping support for py3.8 and py3.9. Legacy versions of mace-torch always exist on pypi for those who are truly limited to unsupported end-of-life versions. Using a modern version of python is as simple as:

wget -qO- https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh
uv venv --python 3.10
uv pip install git+https://github.com/ACEsuit/mace.git