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Please Help to Port python-debianbts to Python3

Dear Lazyweb,

I’m currently trying to find a way to port python-debianbts to Python3. Debian’s standard bugreport tool reportbug depends on python-debianbts and can thus not convert to Python3 if python-debianbts does not as well. Unfortunately python-debianbts depends on SoapPy for parsing the Debian bugtracker’s responses, and that library is not ported to Python3 yet, and probably never will.

I’m planning to replace SoapPy with pysimplesoap which is available for Python2 and Python3. Unfortunately debbugs does not support WSDL which makes parsing of the replies extremely painful and error-prone. I wonder if there is a  SOAP/Python expert out there who’d be willing to give some assistance in porting python-reportbug to pysimplesoap? python-reportbug’s repository is on GitHub and patches are very welcome.

Since SOAP is quite a beast and debbugs uses it for read-only purposes only, another attractive solution would be to replace/augment debbugs’ API with something much more simple, like JSON. That would make parsing extremely easy as many programming languages including Python support JSON without any external libraries. In theory this could be quite easy but requires some serious Perl skills.