Adpot SPEC0

[DavidMStraub]

Hey all,

have you thought about adopting SPEC0 for Python version support? It would limit the number of Python versions to be supported to 3 (rather than, soon, 5 that haven't reached EOL).

In practice it would mean dropping Python 3.10 support right now and 3.11 in a couple of weeks.

I think it makes perfect sense, especially since PyBaMM depends on a lot of packages that have adopted SPEC0, so it seems difficult to continue supporting older versions as dependencies drop support (example: #5052 & Numpy).

[agriyakhetarpal]

Hi @DavidMStraub, thanks for the suggestion. Indeed, we have discussed this before, and I think our main reason for not adopting it was because we did not want to commit to the same level of Python support as other scientific Python packages, given that they move faster than Python – "if nothing is broken, don't fix it". Right now, we're not supporting Python 3.13 (or free-threaded equivalents) yet because of the lack of NumPy 2.x support (which is going to be resolved soon), which means that dropping another Python version would change our support array to be too narrow (just 3.11 and 3.12).

cc @Saransh-cpp, who previously also had some concerns about the adoption of SPEC0 within PyBaMM.