Python 3.8 EOL looms

[dsweber2]

Came up in discussions with @nolangormley, it appears 3.8 is EOL by the end of 2024. There are some packages which seem to depend on 3.8, so we need to figure out how to update that/workaround. Related to #1854

[melange396]

looking at the version release cycle info in your python.org link, we might want to aim to use python 3.12 for longevity, but we could end up being hamstrung into bumping to just 3.9 instead as seen in cmu-delphi/delphi-epidata#1019

[dshemetov]

Some useful resources:

• Support for popular Python packages by Python version
• Search Python changes by version (try typing in 3.9 in the search bar)

[dshemetov]

Some criteria:

• upgraded Python version should support all our dependencies
• upgraded Python version should be supported by our Dockerfiles (or we need to find workarounds for those Dockerfiles)
  • for instance, this Docker image which is used in our server Dockerfiles here only supports Python 3.9