Python 3.11

[JasonGrace2282]

Django 5 (Removed from PR)

Took a look through the changelog of Django 5, didn't seem that bad so went ahead and updated it.
Only change was the removal of USE_L10N (the default value became True, and the setting was deprecated).

Based off the changelog, the only breaking change that could happen is the following

Passing unsaved model instances to related filters is deprecated. In Django 5.0, the exception will be raised.

But I find this unlikely, as we are already on 4.2 and don't have any warnings.

Python

I looked through the changelog for Python 3.9, 3.10, and 3.11. None of the changes should cause problems, at least based off the porting guides for the versions.
3.11
3.10
3.9

Why not Python 3.12?
To put it simply, python 3.12 is only recently getting "accepted" into the python and linux ecosystems (it's in bugfix stage), so I figured it would be better to wait on that one. Besides, Python 3.11 goes EOL in 2027, which is long enough that it shouldn't be a big deal (however, NEP 29 recommends that Python 3.11 support should end in April 2025).

Motivation

• Python 3.8 is going to reach EOL by the start of the 2024-25 school year (bad)
• Django says that 4.2 is basically compatible with 5.0, after fixing deprecation warnings
• As a grading software, Tin should always try to keep up with security fixes and bug patches.

[krishnans2006]

Nice PR - thanks for doing this. Obviously, such a change requires a production server upgrade (both an Ubuntu version upgrade and a Python version upgrade), and the best time for this would probably be early summer. So, holding off on merging this PR until then.

[etnguyen03]

Django says that 4.2 is basically compatible with 5.0, after fixing deprecation warnings

Generally with CSL stuff, we've held off on upgrading Django versions until an LTS version comes out (i.e. 5.2, 6.2, etc.). Not sure if that's what you want to do

[JasonGrace2282]

Sure, I don't mind, there's no features I'm particularly excited about in django 5. I'll just remove the changes regarding django and make this PR about Python 3.11.

the best time for this would probably be early summer.

Yup, I would've recommended the very same thing.

[krishnans2006]

A minor suggestion before we get to testing/migration:

[JasonGrace2282]

After #21 we would also have to update the ruff target-version option from py38 to py311, and remove the tomli dependency from pre-commit. However, this would cause pre-commit ci to auto-push updates (mostly regarding deprecations in the typing module), so I'll update that in a follow-up PR.

[krishnans2006]

🤞