**Proposal**
I propose to drop support for Python 3.5 with Pywikibot 8.0 (deployed probably in September 2022).
Toolforge is going to have Python 3.7 and 3.9 available in May (T268438) and there are further advantages with Python 3.6+.
Please add your remarks, expand pros and cons and maybe draw attention to it when you find a blocker.
**Pros**
- Python 3.6 comes with improvements like path-like objects, f-strings, variable type hints, which are very important for furher Pywikibot developent. [1]
- Pywikibot gui cannot be used with Python 3.5 due to T278743
- Also a lot of packages does not support Python 3.5 with their current release. This concerns in particular `requests` package and wikitext parser modules `wikitextparser` and `mwparserfromhell` [2]
- The end of life cycle of Python 3.5 has been reached since 13th September 2020 [3]
- Our documenation recommondates Python 3.6 or higher [4]
- Python 3.5 does not support pathlike objects. Path from pathlib is often used in Pywikibot and some workarounds are needed to support Python 3.5
- Python 3.5 does not `hashlib.blake2b` which is used by Pywikibot [5]
- Older Python versions are still supported with Pywikibot releases marked with a tag [6][7]
- L10N updates can be done by maintenance scripts for older Python versions
- Pywikibot 3.5 is not used very often (~ 0.3 %), see T266984
**Cons**
- Python 3.6 has syntax changes which cannot be backported in any way.
- Pywikibot is not updated for older Python versions
- Bugfixes are not available for older Pywikibot versions
**Refs**
[1] https://docs.python.org/3.6/whatsnew/3.6.html
[2] https://codesearch.wmcloud.org/pywikibot/?q=%5B%3C%3D%3E%5D%20%5B'%22%5D3%5C.6&i=nope&files=&excludeFiles=&repos=
[3] https://endoflife.date/python
[4] https://doc.wikimedia.org/pywikibot/stable/index.html
[5] https://docs.python.org/3.11/library/hashlib.html?highlight=blake2b#hashlib.blake2b
[6] https://pypi.org/project/pywikibot/#history
[7] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/admin/repos/pywikibot/core,tags