Consider dropping six again now that Python 3.13 alphas are coming out

[simonw]

Original title: six.moves is incompatible with the Python 3.13 alphas, so dateutil does not currently work with Python 3.13 - but then on further investigation I could not replicate the reported error.

This was reported on one of my projects here:

• Incompatible with Python 3.13 alpha (dependency on six.moves and other issues) simonw/llm#436

The reported error was:

...
  File "/Users/senthilx/cpython/virtualenvs/python313/lib/python3.13/site-packages/dateutil/tz/__init__.py", line 2, in <module>
    from .tz import *
  File "/Users/senthilx/cpython/virtualenvs/python313/lib/python3.13/site-packages/dateutil/tz/tz.py", line 21, in <module>
    from six.moves import _thread
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'six.moves'

Dropping six was previously discussed here, but that was over a year ago long before the Python 3.13 alphas came out:

• RFE: drop use six #1258

https://pypi.org/project/six/#history has not had a release since May 2021. It's not yet clear from the six issue tracker if they plan to release a version for Python 3.13: https://github.com/benjaminp/six/issues

[simonw]

... this may not be a problem with dateutil after all. I wasn't able to replicate it against my own fresh installation of Python 3.13 alpha, from pyenv:

pyenv install 3.13.0a3

Then:

~/.pyenv/versions/3.13.0a3/bin/python -m venv /tmp/3.13.0a3
/tmp/3.13.0a3/bin/pip install python-dateutil

And:

/tmp/3.13.0a3/bin/python -c 'import dateutil; print(dateutil.parser.parse("10 june"))'

Outputs:

2024-06-10 00:00:00

[hugovk]

Tests were passing for 3.13 two months ago: #1337

[simonw]

I'm going to close this. It looks like dateutil remains committed to Python 2.7 support, so six needs to stay:

dateutil/.github/workflows/validate.yml

Line 16 in 1ae8077

"2.7",

I do think it would be reasonable for dateutil to drop Python 2.7 support in future versions, since people on Python 2.7 who ran pip install python-dateutil would continue to get a working 2.9.0 version forever even though future releases didn't support them.