Question about the future of this repository and Python 3 support

[ross-spencer]

I reached out on twitter but then realized in endeavoring to be a better OSS contributor, I should also make a ticket here for the community to engage with.

At @archivematica we're in the process of migrating our code to python 3 before 2.7 hits its end of life.

SWORD2 is used in our AIP store for our DSpace and LOCKSS models. We use this library to achieve that but this library is only compatible with Python 2.7.

Are there any plans to take migrate this code to Python 3, and what that timeline might be? Do the community working with this library have plans to migrate the code? Or are there alternatives that can be recommended?

[richard-jones]

It's a good question. The challenge is that no one is currently funding central maintenance of this code library, so it is down to the community at the moment. I'm not aware of an alternative to this library in Python at the moment.

We are currently looking for funding for the next round of work, and I could ask if maintenance of this library can be included, but I think that even then the timeline wouldn't work for the Python 2.7 EOL.