Upstream pandas 3.0 will only try to use xlsxwriter if it is >= 3.2.0.

They appear to have chosen this version via a blanket "require <~ 1 year
old" policy ( https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/pull/60655 ) and not
because of any specific known problem.  The pandas 3 package I have in
Salsa reduces this to >= 3.0.0 and passes its tests with Debian's 3.1.9.
  Hence, this is *not* blocking anything.

However, is there any reason not to actually update xlsxwriter?

Hi Rebecca,

https://salsa.debian.org/python-team/packages/xlsxwriter/-/merge_requests/1

One side effect you should know about: upstream stopped shipping the built
HTML manual, so the package loses its offline docs. I've written up the
options in the MR.

I also ran pandas' Excel tests against 3.1.9 and 3.2.9 in a sid container and
got identical results, so nothing breaks for the pandas we ship today. But
that's 2.3.3, so it doesn't tell us anything about 3.0. If you get a chance
to build your pandas 3 against it, that would actually answer the question.

Needs a sponsor still. I'll ask on debian-python.

Malik