Reconsider support for Python 3.6?

[hattom]

As briefly discussed in slack, despite Python < 3.9 already being officially unsupported [1] (and use of eb with python < 3.9 leads to a deprecation warning on invocation), eb still works with python 3.6 (as far as I know).

We are running SLES 15sp7 on our cluster, which has EOL 2031, and it has base python version of 3.6.
While it's likely that we won't still be running SLES15 all the way until EOL, we would certainly plan at least a few more years.

My preference is to run eb with the system python. Even if this is not an insurmountable hurdle, that's what's worked out best for me to date.

[1] https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-framework/pull/4966/changes

[boegel]

@hattom Thanks for raising this. We should couple this with the existing issue we have on this (which is a bit out of date):

• Python 3.6 (probably <=3.8) deprecation in EB 5 easybuild-framework#4676

We'll also discuss this at the upcoming EasyBuild User Meeting (EUM'26).

In short:

• We don't have concrete plans yet to actively drop support for running EasyBuild on top of Python 3.6. For now, we're still running the framework test suite with Python 3.6, for example. But that may change if that starts becoming problematic...
• I consider it very likely that EasyBuild 6.0 (ETA spring 2027) will no longer support Python 3.6. There are some (vague) plans to even be a bit more aggressive than that even, and require Python 3.9 or even newer.

The deprecation warning we introduced serves as a "wake up call" for people who can't (easily) jump to a Python newer than 3.6. Should we indeed drop support for Python 3.6, we'll try and provide guidelines on how to deal with that in case the system Python that you're using is still 3.6.

Can you provide some more information on why using a newer Python version would be problematic? Is uv an option for you?