[LabPython-Users] Updates to the project

[Daniele N. <da...@gr...>]

Hello,

I recently discovered LabPython and I'm considering using it, However,
it seems that there is not much activity on the project and that it
cannot be used in its current state on a modern system.

I downloaded the code and implemented some of the required updates:

- I replaced the Visual Studio based build system with a 'waf' build
  script [1] (https://waf.io/). This makes the project independent of
  the compiler suite, and Python is of course already a dependency to
  build LabPython, and I expect anyone interested in hacking on it to
  be at least minimally familiar with Python to be able to understand
  what the build script does.

- In the process of making it work with recent Python releases, I
  cleaned up the code a bit removing the support for loading the python
  interpreter support library at runtime. It made things much more
  complex without any apparent benefit.

- I imported the CVS project history into a git repository and I'm
  considering to merge the 'labpython_c_source' and 'labpython' modules
  into one. I would like to migrate the project to GitLab.

There are two things that I would still like to work on:

- I'm considering directly linking the pytscript shared library to the
  lvpython shared library as I don't see the advantage of the runtime
  loading. This would allow to drop some more code.

- I see LabVIEW crashes on loading/unloading/reloading of VIs using
  LabPython. I suspect something is wrong either in the Python
  interpreter is initialized, or in the threads managements. I would
  like to investigate this a bit more.

I would like to hear the opinion of the old maintainers of the project
about what I've done and about the plans I have, and, because of the
very low recent activity I would like to ask if they mind if I take over
maintenance, migrating the project to GitLab.

In any case, if a migration away from CVS as a version control system is
seen as something desirable, I volunteer to take care of it. For that I
would like to collect for each person that contributed to the project a
real name and a preferred email address to associate to their SorceForge
user names, that will be used to identify the authors of the commits in
the project history. I can get real names from SourceForge, but
apparently I cannot obtain email addresses. Due to the very low traffic
on this mailing list I added the email address of the SorceForge project
admins that I found with a web search in Cc.

Thank you. Cheers,
Daniele