DRAFT Introduce CFFI-based Python bindings

[Patrick Totzke]

Quoting David Bremner (2017-11-28 23:59:26)
> Floris Bruynooghe <flub at devork.be> writes:
> 
> >
> > Lastly there are some downsides to the choices I made:
> > - I ended up going squarely for CPython 3.6+.  Choosing Python
> >   3 allowed better API design, e.g. with keyword-only parameters
> >   etc.  Choosing CPython 3.4+ restricts the madness that can
> >   happen with __del__ and gives some newer (tho now unused)
> >   features in weakref.finalizer.
> > - This is no longer drop-in compatible.
> > - I haven't got to a stage where my initial goal of speed has
> >   been proven yet.
> 
> I guess you'll have to convince the maintainers / users of alot and afew
> that this makes sense before we go much further. I'd point out that
> Debian stable is only at python 3.5, so that makes me a bit wary of this
> (being able to run the test suite on debian stable and similar aged
> distros useful for me, and I suspect other developers).
> 
> I know there are issues with memory management in the current bindings,
> so that may be a strong reason to push to python 3.6; it seems to need
> more investigation at the moment.
> 
> d


I am generally in favour of modernizing the notmuch python bindings,
especially when it comes to memory management and exception handling.

At the moment, the alot interface officially only supports python v2.7
but our dependencies have now mostly been updated and we are working on
port to python 3, see here: https://github.com/pazz/alot/pull/1055

@Floris, you are welcome to join #alot on freenode if you want to
discuss details on that.

You mention that your new API breaks compatibility with the existing
ones. Do you have some demo code that uses the new API for reference?

Cheers,
P
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