The future of PyGopherd
John Goerzen <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.network.gopher.general |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Hi folks, With the deprecation of Python 2, pygopherd needs some help to be ported to Python 3. Or, perhaps, something else. I originally wrote PyGopherd with the goal of being a replacement for UMN gopherd. UMN gopherd has some interesting dotfile formats that are used for providing metadata and links. Over on quux.org, this compatibility is used extensively both for local content and for serving mirrors of content that no longer exists elsewhere. There were a number of cases where sites were available by both FTP and gopher, and I mirrored using FTP, which included the UMN metadata files. I started a port to Python 3, but very quickly ran into numerous issues with Python 3's unicode-centric design. Things such as the zipfile module assuming that all pre-unicode ZIP files use CP437. Things such as non-UTF8 filenames being a huge PITA. Of course, all of the mirrored Gopher content predates Unicode and so non-UTF8 bytes are common. Pygopherd has extensive testing that surfaced these issues very quickly. However, I have found that my heart is really not into fighting with Python 3 on this. I am wondering: 1) Would anybody be interested in taking over maintaining pygopherd, beginning with the port to Python 3? 2) Would anybody be interested in adding UMN gopherd metadata support to another server? (there was some discussion in IRC about geobyidae doing this but I'm unsure how that progressed) Thanks, John