Yeah, I planned to do an announcement here, likely as part of next version release notes, but might as well do it now.

BTW, I really wonder how many users are actually affected - the version in Extras has really not been updated in a while, mainly do to most of the recent work & fixes not really affecting the parts of modRana in use on Maemo. I guess that also kinda implies the code duplication that has been in place up till now. :P

Pretty much - for some time this was an interesting exercise in keeping a non trivial application compatible with a wide range of Python versions (2.5-3.4/3.6). This experience came really handy at work at Red Hat when I helped to port the Anaconda installer used by Fedora/CentOS/RHEL to Python 3.

Still I don't think supporting Python 2, especially the ancient Python 2.5 needed for the N900 is viable anymore, with Sailfish OS upgrading to 3.7 a while ago, Python 2 going EOL this January & Fedora and other distros getting ridd of Python 2 software where possible.

Another issue is also the original GTK2/Cairo GUI - back then it really was the best option given the environment (first the Neo FreeRunner & early N900), but things changed quite a bit since then.

Newer GUI technologies, such as Qt 5/QML make achieving what modRana needs in it's interface much easier, nice, faster and more responsive with far lesser amount of custom code & hacks needed to achieve the desired end result.

Also let's say I can write much better code now than I did 10 years ago + not all design decisions I did back then turned out to be good. ;-)

So this really had to be done & would likely be done much sooner in another project - but at least we can celebrate the 10th modRana aniversary with a bang! :-)

(I started working on modRana for my bachelors thesis at the end of Janury 2010.)

Hopefully this change will make the source code of modRana much more readable, fully Python 3 compatible & more unit-testable. Also potentiall contributors will be much less likely to run away screaming when they no longer see modules full of Python 2/3 compatible code mixed together with direct drawing of screen content via Cairo vector commands. ;-)

I have actually created a N900 specific branch in case some fixes would be needed after Python 2 & GTK2 support has been dropped from the master branch:

https://github.com/M4rtinK/modrana/tree/n900-branch

That could be a good starting point for such an update effort. Still, I'm not sure I will still be able to generate the needed source-deb file, not to mention being able to talk to autobuilder in the correct manner.

Assistance of someone who still has the necessary tools available would be definitely welcome.