[chirp_users] New Python coming?

[Richard Shaw]

On Mon, Mar 4, 2019 at 4:43 PM Dan Clemmensen <danclemmensen at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Conversion to Python3 is a big issue, for Chirp and for many other
> projects. A main underlying problem is that CHIRP depends on underlying
> projects that have not converted. Nevertheless, The main CHIRP developer is
> in fact working on a conversion. In addition to the CHIRP core, there are
> also more than 100 separate driver modules to support different radios, and
> it all must be converted. The developers of Python in their infinite wisdom
> made changes that affect the semantics of many Python constructs, so all of
> that stuff needs to be checked, more or less by hand. The average driver is
> more that 500 lines of code, so there are more than 500,000 lines of code
> to be checked just in the drivers. Perhaps the biggest changes in Python
> affect the way strings are handled: Python 3 makes a distinction between
> text strings and byte strings that did not exist in Python 2. But guess
> what? serial I/O depends very heavily on the precise semantics of the
> manipulation of byte strings, and each driver has its own unique serial I/O
> code.  I am a very recent addition to the CHIRP development community, so
> the best I could do initially was to make sure that the driver that I wrote
> is compatible with both Python2 and Python 3.
>

Thank you for making an effort to provide a detailed description. Part of
my annoyance is bugs are often closed with terse reasoning or just flat out
being ignored. I maintain Chirp on Fedora because I run linux at home so
it's really my only option but I haven't found a very welcoming upstream in
years past. I've volunteered to loan radios (my Alinco DR-635 which I WISH
I could program in chirp... No response.) I've asked for tips on how to
update the Alinco driver. I have some experience with serial communications
so I'm not starting from zero... no response.

Hence my frustrations...

Thanks,
Richard
KF5OIM
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