Can't install folium on Linux Mint with Python 2.7 because of error with branca

Question

I am trying to install folium on my Linux machine which has Python2.7 but I keep getting this error for the dependency package branca (copy pasted from terminal, I get this error if I try to install folium as well, I've done the --no-cache-dir so you can see the error is the same even if I don't use the one pip has now cached on my machine):

user@linux_mint ~/Desktop/map $ pip install branca --no-cache-dir
/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip/_vendor/requests/__init__.py:83: RequestsDependencyWarning: Old version of cryptography ([1, 2, 3]) may cause slowdown.
  warnings.warn(warning, RequestsDependencyWarning)
DEPRECATION: Python 2.7 reached the end of its life on January 1st, 2020. Please upgrade your Python as Python 2.7 is no longer maintained. A future version of pip will drop support for Python 2.7. More details about Python 2 support in pip, can be found at https://pip.pypa.io/en/latest/development/release-process/#python-2-support
Defaulting to user installation because normal site-packages is not writeable
Collecting branca
  Downloading branca-0.4.0.tar.gz (41 kB)
     |████████████████████████████████| 41 kB 263 kB/s 
    ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1:
     command: /usr/bin/python -c 'import sys, setuptools, tokenize; sys.argv[0] = '"'"'/tmp/pip-install-gK2ddq/branca/setup.py'"'"'; __file__='"'"'/tmp/pip-install-gK2ddq/branca/setup.py'"'"';f=getattr(tokenize, '"'"'open'"'"', open)(__file__);code=f.read().replace('"'"'\r\n'"'"', '"'"'\n'"'"');f.close();exec(compile(code, __file__, '"'"'exec'"'"'))' egg_info --egg-base /tmp/pip-install-gK2ddq/branca/pip-egg-info
         cwd: /tmp/pip-install-gK2ddq/branca/
    Complete output (6 lines):
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
      File "/tmp/pip-install-gK2ddq/branca/setup.py", line 41
        print(error, file=sys.stderr)  # noqa
                         ^
    SyntaxError: invalid syntax
    ----------------------------------------
ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1: python setup.py egg_info Check the logs for full command output.

What's the problem here? Is it because I can't use branca with Python 2.7 and I need to upgrade to 3.x IF I want to use folium?

Or is there some way to still use folium with Python2.7?

I use a lot of 2.7 Python on my machine so I don't really want to upgrade if I can avoid it. I am a hobbyist and this is a small side-project so if I can avoid getting into 3.x a bit longer I'd like to (with all respect, please don't tell me about why that's bad unless it's relevant to getting folium going... that's not my question, and I know Python 2.7 is becoming history... my question is really just how do I get branca and folium installed on a Python 2.7 machine with minimum fuss).

I just wanna make some maps :)

Thank you.

EDIT:

user@linux_mint ~/Desktop/map $ python -V
Python 2.7.12
user@linux_mint ~/Desktop/map $ pip -V
pip 20.0.2 from /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip (python 2.7)

Answer 1

The branca repository on github includes a commit named "drop py2k" which removed code that supported Python2 from the application. Among the code removed was this ImportError:

if sys.version_info < (3, 0):
    raise ImportError(
        """You are running branca {} on Python 2
    branca 0.4 and above are no longer compatible with Python 2, but somehow
    you got this version anyway. Make sure you have pip >= 9.0 to avoid this
    kind of issue, as well as setuptools >= 24.2:
     $ pip install pip setuptools --upgrade
    Your choices:
    - Upgrade to Python 3.
    - Install an older version of branca:
     $ pip install 'branca<0.4.0'
    """.format(__version__))  # noqa

So you need to specify an earlier version when installing, like this:

pip install branca<0.4.0