[chirp_devel] Python 3 status

[Dan Smith]

> The world has moved to Git.

OMG, really? I totally missed this memo. I guess we *have* to move. We should probably all run Windows too, right? Yay monoculture! :)

> (On a personal note, I was quite interested in working on the py3 branch until I discovered all of the compatibility cruft, at which point I lost interest entirely.)

So why are you here? Just heckling and hoping that someone else will get the project to the point where you're willing to contribute? This is my general hesitancy to move stuff just because someone shows up and says "If only this project used tool X, then I'd contribute." The opinions of people who have actually contributed meaningfully weigh much more on me than those that haven't.

Moving to a new language and toolchain requires people that *have* contributed a lot to change, it requires me to change my build environment, and other knock-on impacts. Obviously I want it to just magically be current, but that involves a lot of work on my part, and even though might be great if it meant more contributors, it's still work.

As I said I would, just created this:

https://github.com/kk7ds/chirp

...and I will endeavor to sync back and forth between there and the mercurial repo so that people can, for the moment, submit to either. If/when the github side becomes the obvious default (clearly it will over time) and we can get the current major contributors happy with it, then I can work on making the build infrastructure pull from git and then stop the mercurial synchronization.

One of the primary reasons to tolerate github, IMHO, is travis, but unfortunately travis has seemingly abandoned the OSS people that used it before. In just working to get the tests running in travis I burned a substantial number of my own credits just getting it going, so at this point, I don't think it's really an option, unfortunately. I hope that changes.

For those that have set up unofficial git repos, it would probably benefit the world if you could either mark those as deprecated, remove them, or at least point at the above repo in a comment or something.

Joe, I assume you'd rather propose your patches (which I haven't looked at yet) against the github repo. If not, let me know.

--Dan