What should get done before a 2.x release with Python 3.6+?

[MartinThoma]

I've just received a PR which is Python 3.6 only. I've seen at least one PR of a contributor struggling with the weird Unicode handling of Python 2.X.

I would like to move to Python 3.6 as soon as possible for those reasons:

1. Fairness and Reliability of PyPDF2: Python 2.7 is dead for a long time and people had a good chance to make the switch. Who wants to use PyPDF2 with Python 2.X can still use the PyPDF2 1.X versions - they will just not receive any updates
2. Ease for Contributors: Unicode handling mostly
3. Type annotations
4. f-strings: PEP 498 in Python 3.6 introduced them.

Sadly, if we want to keep Python 3.6 we will not be able to use dataclasses.

What do you think about (a) dropping Python 2.X support with a 1.x release or (2) make the next release the 2.x release - hence not working on merging all of the existing PRs first?

[MartinThoma]

One crucial thing that I want to draft soon is a "project governance" document where we agree on "ways of working" - so what you can expect from a Maintainer (me + future ones), what I expect from contributors, how releases should go. Maybe also something about conflict resolution, although I'm uncertain if the PyPDF2 community is big enough for that.

Also how to prevent that a single maintainer stops the whole project from continuing - but besides a process this requires at least one other person who would be ready to step in.