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Yeah, the exact date was not super clear to me @ydshieh 🥲, do you have more infos from experience? Official website only says October, without a given day, so I guess it's already EOL? Or at the end of the month? (but very unlikely they would have a last release in the last month anyway I guess)

do you have more infos from experience?

No. From previous python versions, it is definitely not something predictable (i.e. not always the end of the month):

3.8 2024-10-07
3.7 2023-06-27
3.6 2021-12-23
3.5 2020-09-30

Not strictly required, but as the output of those functions cannot change anyway, it's an easy and nice way to cache the result without having to define 10k global variables as was done previously. About one third/half of them had it previously already
It's basically a tiny performance optimization

Merging as we released last v4 version already!

(note that transformers@main can still be installed on 3.9 since it's not completely dropped in setup.py and raises AttributeError: module 'importlib.metadata' has no attribute 'packages_distributions')

Indeed, I forgot it! It was fixed in #41410 already, thanks for checking-in!