The future of PyGopherd

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org>]

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