Upcoming EoL of Python 3.7

[mitchos]

Hi pyZscaler community

This is a courtesy announcement that I'll be looking to drop support for Python 3.7 in the next minor release (1.5.0). This is likely to be the release that supports ZDX so if you need support for ZDX then please read on. ZDX development is underway and there is no specific or anticipated release date yet (I'll commit to having it done well before June 2023 though).

Why?

Python 3.7 is approaching end-of-life (EoL) on 27 JUN 23. This means that security support will end from the Python maintainers and you should be looking at moving to 3.8 or above. I'm a big fan of endoflife.date for keeping an eye on EoL versions. You can see the Python specific pages here.

What's the impact?

There will be no impact to pyZscaler users running Python 3.7 - you simply won't be able to take advantage of later versions and you will remain pinned to pyZscaler 1.4.x.

pyZscaler will only support Python features for the lowest version that pyZscaler supports, i.e. Python 3.8 from version 1.5.0 onwards.

Where to from here?

pyZscaler's test suite currently runs against the latest release of Python across versions 3.7-3.10. I'll continue to retain support for all currently supported versions of Python, i.e. 3.8-3.11.

If you absolutely require functionality from future pyZscaler versions

If you're hell-bent on using an EoL Python version or your company is not serious about security, you may fork the latest pyZscaler develop branch and repackage for 3.7 until you're able to upgrade. You will be responsible for ensuring any current pyZscaler code is compatible with your fork.