Python 3 Support

So… Python 3 is starting to be used more and more and, more tellingly, being shipped as default on many Linux distros.

I have started a fork at https://github.com/jspc/spiderfoot/tree/python3 which works under python3 merely as a WIP. Now this repo has no tests written for it as far as I can see (which is bad anyway) so a simple smoke test is all I’ve been able to do.

Alongside the changes in this fork for Python3 there is also:

• Fixed the formatting and copy on the readme
• Fixed the use of DOS line breaks
• Usage of a .gitignore file.

The main reason for this fork: should this project not be using Python3? Why would it not use Python3?

[smicallef]

@doxingme if you look at the age of this issue, it goes back to 2013. I stand by my comment in saying that porting to Python 3 was a low priority back then. It’s a higher priority now, and will probably happen within the next before Python 2 is EOL, but it remains a lower priority to getting support for additional data feeds and improving stability / reducing false positives. Furthermore, the main challenge to porting to Python 3 is in having the various third party library dependencies also support Python 3. I haven’t checked if they all do recently, but last time I checked (admittedly over a year ago), a few didn’t and there were no Python 3 alternatives.

So with regard to that and PEP8-compliance of the code base, I agree with the gist of @bcoles comment. The beauty of open source is that you can contribute to it any time, so if you feel strongly about it, any PR helping to move the code base to Python 3 would be happily accepted and highly appreciated.

[bcoles]

SpiderFoot now requires Python 3.