I was working on a mail system today and inadvertently noticed that its Pyzor 
was broken. When I tried to reinstall Pyzor according to the web documentation 
with "pip3 install pyzor" I got what claimed to be v1.0.0 and no complaints 
from the installer but when running the pyzor client tool, it kicked out errors 
indicating to me that the program had not been even trivially updated to work 
with Python 3. I did the absolute hackiest thing I could to make it work 
(blanket s/iteritems/items/ and s/xrange/range/ to address specific error 
messages) and it did so, but that's not acceptable. Neither is reinstalling a 
Python2 world.

I went looking for a better fix and found a reported issue at 
https://github.com/SpamExperts/pyzor/issues/155 matching my original symptoms 
in which a workaround was provided: install directly from the GitHub project's 
master.zip link, i.e. a snapshot assembled from the current state of the repo, 
which claims to be v1.1.1. I do not like that solution at all, and added a 
comment to that issue suggesting that they fix the problem by cutting a release 
for PyPI. No response yet, but it has only been a matter of minutes.

FOR NOW: If you are running a system where Python 2.x no longer exists (that 
should be everywhere...) and you've never confirmed that Pyzor is working for 
you, do so now. If you pipe a message to 'pyzor check' and it gives you a 
response like this you're fine:

   public.pyzor.org:24441       (200, 'OK')     0       0

If instead you get a Python stack trace, obviously it's broken.

I don't feel great recommending any of the obvious mitigations. They are:

1. Install Python 2.7 and pyzor 1.0.0 from PyPI.
2. Hand-patch pyzor 1.0.0 minimally to get it to work with Python 3.
3. Install the head of the development tree from GitHub, whatever that happens 
to be at the moment.

I've chosen #3 for myself, but it's not great.


-- 
Bill Cole
b...@scconsult.com or billc...@apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
Not Currently Available For Hire

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