Drop support for EOLed Python versions

[antonagestam]

As this library has been struggling keeping up with maintenance (correct me if I'm wrong about that), would it make sense to drop support for all the Python versions that has reached EOL?

Especially seeing the recent issues with six was quite surprising, as Python 2 has now been a dead language for close to 4 years.

Specifically I propose to drop support for versions 2.7, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, and 3.7.

[wbarnha]

I intend to drop support for the older versions of Python after the next release, when I figure out what action to take with PyPi.

[a-detiste]

I can provide a PR

[antonagestam]

@a-detiste That likely won't hurt, but note that there still hasn't been any release since @wbarnha posted the above message. IIUC there's issues with communication with the owner of this repository.

[wbarnha]

Correct, I don't have any updates until the owner gets back to me. I apologize for the inconvenience.

[wbarnha]

kafka-python-ng==2.0.3 is now available!

pip3 install kafka-python-ng

[antonagestam]

@wbarnha Interesting. Would it be possible to release that off of this repository instead of the fork?

[wbarnha]

Not yet. If I were to release off this repository, it would create the initial impression to some people that kafka-python itself is getting updates into PyPi, which is not true. Additionally, I would have to go back, re-tag, re-release, and rerun the release workflows. I'm very cautious about messing up a project that is getting an estimate of 2.4M downloads per week (as of 3/10/2024) and I don't want to recreate the stressful mistakes I had when I was more actively maintaining https://github.com/faust-streaming/faust (which is actually how I ended up here, because I was trying to save this project as a dependency of aiokafka).