[chirp_users] New Python coming?

[Richard Shaw]

On Fri, Mar 8, 2019 at 9:56 PM Dan Smith <dsmith at danplanet.com> wrote:

> > There's an issue submitted for it but it got closed without resolution.
> There doesn't seem to be much interest in getting it fixed.
>
> Richard, I'd sure appreciate you not spreading misinformation in such a
> public forum. It creates extra work for developers which have to end up
> spending time writing replies like these instead of working on CHIRP (like
> me, spending my Friday night writing this email). In general, this
> community is really awesome because it provides the support outlet by
> letting power users help the non-power users so that those of us that work
> on CHIRP can focus our efforts there.
>

I can admit I was venting a bit so please accept my apologies, but I did in
fact ask on two separate occasions (years apart) for help, even just hints,
on how to go about adding my Alinco DR-635 and was met with zero helpful
responses both times. And that was after I offered to ship my radio to a
dev. That may not be everyone's experience but it was mine.



> A lot of work has been done on making CHIRP work for python3. Because the
> UI toolkit we use has gone from "the obvious choice" to "complete
> abandonware" during the lifetime of CHIRP, porting to python3 requires a
> re-write of some substantial parts of the GUI, in *addition* to the large
> amount of work required to account for some of the fundamental things that
> python decided to change between 2 and 3.
>
> Porting to python3 is not just some minor amount of work that we just need
> to spend a couple afternoons doing. It's a major undertaking, and merely
> opening a new bug on the website is not the only thing that needs to be
> done. Opening multiple duplicate issues (and being unhelpful and snarky in
> those) is just a distraction. That's why issues have been closed as
> duplicates of this original one:
>

Thank you for the detailed description of the problem and update, however,
I wish it didn't take this thread to provoke a detailed response. I know
everyone's a volunteer here (myself included, I maintain over 150 packages
between Fedora and RPM Fusion). Regardless, both the issue tracker and this
mailing list are how you interface with your "customers". The simple truth
is that even when something is "free" people still get frustrated when they
feel ignored. I try to stay on top of my bugzilla tickets but sometimes I
miss one.

As you can see from the "Associated Revisions" section on the bottom right,
> there has been a lot of work done on this. Many people have showed up over
> the years saying they were going to do the work of porting, but nothing
> substantive has come from these plans over the years. Since the future of
> Python2 on Windows has a much (much) longer road, and since working around
> a distro missing python2 is so trivially easy, I have chosen to focus my
> time over the years on adding support for new radio drivers. There is, of
> course, an unending supply of *those* requests as well.
>

I deal with a lot of upstream projects but can admit I'm not very familiar
with the issue tracker chirp uses. I'll make sure I pay more attention to
that section in the future.



> Please rest assured that nobody is taking this situation lightly. 95% of
> CHIRP users are on Windows, and there is currently zero concern about the
> python2-based windows build being at risk. The remaining users on other
> platforms (and I'm one of them, btw) have many options to work around the
> issue in the short term. If you choose a Linux distro that has a
> super-aggressive deprecation policy, has already dropped python2 and
> provides no way to install it, then, well, you got what you asked for :)
>

 Again, thanks for the detailed response. I know Windows has the vast
majority of users, but the original EOL was earlier than 2020 and then
moved out. Additionally, its 1/1/2020, not the end of 2020 which means <1
year. You may see Fedora as "aggressive" but we don't want to ship software
that's not supported, especially something as important as Python.

Thanks,
Richard
KF5OIM
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