Is there a reason this can't be carried by a patch at the install site? Bazel has first-class support for patching rules.

We support current Python versions via https://devguide.python.org/versions/

3.4 is EOL and there are likely to be other things that won't work beyond the bootstrap. It's a maintenance burden too. Much easier to decline fixes that are to support old language features than it is to try wind back code to support something beyond its useful shelf life.

I was under the impression the bootstrap script specifically was intended to work as far back as Python 2.7.

The project itself is configured to use Python 3.11.

We deprecated PY2 a while ago now and probably didn't clean up that comment. Or we should have reframed it as best effort.

Can you link to the project? Can you include your patch where the rules are installed, or indeed store a bootstrap template in your repo?

I can work around locally, I only sent out this PR as a courtesy since it seemed like an unintentional regression.

Thanks! Yes, we may indeed end up using it. But one thing is for sure, we probably need to more clearly document supported python versions.

Thank you for the contribution. Since we are testing in CI only against supported Python versions, these regressions are somewhat inevitable, I guess. Most of the codebase used to work with Python 2.7 but retaining that compatibility cannot be guaranteed even within the same major semver, because we are not going to have tests for it. I am happy to merge this though and I am happy to accept future contributions to help us maintain that compatibility if it breaks again in the future.

It's like tier1 and tier2 python version system. Tier1 are the versions that we have in CI, Tier2 - all the rest. Maybe we should write that in our docs.