Remove use of importlib_resources once we hit a baseline of Python 3.9+

[robinwhittleton]

As we now require Python 3.8+ we can replace importlib_resources with the built-in importlib.resources. I did this work, only to find that the suggested updates actually required functionality that was only added to importlib.resources in Python 3.9. Still, for posterity I’ve pushed the branch to https://github.com/standardebooks/tools/tree/remove_importlib_resources. When we change to require 3.9+ I can rebase the branch and submit a PR.

Out of interest I checked, and it looks like Ubuntu 20.04 LTS has a default of Python 3.8, 22.04 LTS uses Python 3.10, and 24.04 LTS uses Python 3.12.

[acabal]

We're sticking to 22.04 until EOL so it's going to be a long time until this can be merged in :)

[robinwhittleton]

22.04 uses 3.10 though? https://packages.ubuntu.com/jammy/python3 . In which case maybe we should bump the minimum version in setup?

[acabal]

Ah I suppose it does. Well if you want to check if all the dependencies work on 3.9 you can give it a shot.

[robinwhittleton]

I’d hope they all work, given that I’m not having any problems with more recent Pythons. But for completeness’ sake, I double-checked each dependency on Pypi and they all look fine for this: the highest requirement was 3.8+ and none of them defined an upper limit. Anyway, up to you of course, I know that bumping stuff in setup has caused you a bunch of hassle over the years.

I did find one slightly worrying thing on Pypi: the version of requests that we depend on has been yanked for security reasons. We should probably update that to the latest patch version.

[acabal]

OK, can you do a PR then?

[robinwhittleton]

Fixed in #707.