pkgw
commented
6 years ago I've been doing most of the aipy maintenance duties lately and this has been something on my mind. Recently I ported over the NRAO CASA Python layer to work on both versions of Python, and porting the C modules was less work than I feared — I thought that would be the most challenging part.
The print statements are the most obvious compatibility problem between Python 2 and 3, but there's a wide range of things to deal with, especially when you have C code. And unfortunately the 2to3 tool will generate code that only runs on Python 3, whereas it is definitely going to be important for aipy to maintain compatibility with both major versions for a while yet.
Anyway, many of us in the Berkeley/aipy orbit expect to be using Python 2 for a while yet, so there hasn't been much pressure to port. I'd like to do it at some point, but I don't exactly have copious free time on my hands. You are extremely welcome to work towards this goal! I will be very thankful to merge any PRs to this end. (I recommend the six module and starting each file with from __future__ import absolute_import, division, print_statement.) But, be warned that there will be a lot of niggly bits to deal with, especially if you're not familiar with Python C extension modules.
cjordan
jaycedowell
yurivict
As python2 support for things like numpy and astropy is going to be killed in the next couple of years, I think it makes sense for everyone to "jump ship". Personally, aipy is the only python package that ties me to python2. Are there any plans on updating the code?
From memory, attempting to install aipy with python3 raises an issue with a print statement, as it's still using the old syntax, but is easily fixed. However, I have no idea how much else needs to be changed. If it helps, I could have a go at changing print statements and other typical differences between 2 and 3.