Thank you so much for this massive cleanup!
To me it would have been utterly impossible to do it! It's contributors like you who keep this project going!

I will have a closer look in the following days, and invite @yarikoptic and @ankostis to do the same.

What do you all think how this change should be released? In theory it would have to be a major version jump, as we might break some people. On the other hand, the API didn't change so the release might be confusing and repelling to everyone else.

From that point of view, it might not be more than a patch release.

You're welcome, and thanks for the maintenance!

Some projects bump major versions to indicate dropping support, some don't.

If following semver, it depends if you consider it a backwards incompatible changes:

8. Major version X (X.y.z | X > 0) MUST be incremented if any backwards incompatible changes are introduced to the public API. It MAY include minor and patch level changes. Patch and minor version MUST be reset to 0 when major version is incremented.

https://semver.org/#spec-item-8

I probably would bump it, but don't have strong opinions.

It's good 2.1.8 was already released with python_requires (c22f1b0), which will help pip install the right version for people still on old Pythons. See:

• https://hackernoon.com/phasing-out-python-runtimes-gracefully-956f112f33c4
• Guide request: gracefully dropping support for older Python versions pypa/packaging.python.org#450
• pypa/packaging.python.org@master...tonybaloney:python_version_tutorial

And since we don't change the public API in that sense, I think a major version bump shouldn't be required. Also I would rather upset those behind ~1000 downloads, rather than confusing (or loosing) those behind the 500k downloads.

I will wait a week for more commends and/or opinions to come in, and if there are no objects, will release a new version next weekend.

Codecov Report

Merging #737 into master will decrease coverage by <.01%.
The diff coverage is 95.5%.

@@            Coverage Diff             @@
##           master     #737      +/-   ##
==========================================
- Coverage   94.66%   94.66%   -0.01%     
==========================================
  Files          60       59       -1     
  Lines        9338     9289      -49     
==========================================
- Hits         8840     8793      -47     
+ Misses        498      496       -2

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