Hello GE Community!
We are always working to improve and iterate upon Great Expectations to best fit the needs of its community. As we’ve seen a steady decline in the overall usage of Python 3.6 and recognize the version as being officially end-of-life as of December 2021, we’ve decided that with our next minor release (v0.15) we will require Python 3.7 or greater. This change will take place on April 7th, 2022.
This change opens up a number of exciting new opportunities to improve the product. With Python 3.7 as our newest minimum supported version, we can:
Leverage useful features such as Data Classes and stronger type annotations to strengthen the quality and integrity of our codebase.
Better integrate with powerful 3rd party libraries that don’t mesh well with Python 3.6 (such as scipy).
Harness the overall performance improvements and upgrades made to the standard library.
For more information, please check out: https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.7.html.
Note that the usage of these new tools and improvements marks a true breaking change; the introduction of dataclasses brings upon syntax and import errors with a Python 3.6 interpreter.
So what does this mean if you or your team are still on Python 3.6? Not to worry! You can either pin your version of great_expectations to <0.15.0 or upgrade your Python version using pyenv, conda, or your operating system’s package manager.
Regardless, our developer relations and core engineering teams are still dedicated to ensuring that you are able to use Great Expectations to its fullest potential. This marks an exciting new chapter for the Great Expectations ecosystem and we look forward to continuing to work with you all to build a shared, open standard for data quality.
If you have any questions regarding this update or run into issues while migrating, feel free to reach out to us on Slack or GitHub.
