DRAFT Introduce CFFI-based Python bindings

[Floris Bruynooghe]

Florian Klink <flokli at flokli.de> writes:

>>> 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.
>>
>>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
>
> afew maintainer here ;-)
>
> I'm also very much in favor of a more modern and pythonic interface, and would
> gladly support retiring python 2, moving to the new interface.
>
> I had a quick glimpse on the code, and would like to do some annotations. I fear
> it's a bit awkward to do this inside the huge patch, which might already have
> changed, and send back via email.
> Did you publish a changeset to github, or somewhere else where I could comment
> on it?

I now also pushed it to github.com/flub/notmuch in the now, it's in the
cffi branch and all code is in bindings/notmuch-cffi.  Not sure if this
helps with commenting, I can make a pull-request to somewhere if you
want - just let me know where.

Cheers,
Floris