ICALEPCS2021 - List of Authors (Ockards, M.T.)

Paper	Title	Page
MOPV036	Porting Control System Software From Python 2 to 3 - Challenges and Lessons	217
	A.F. Joubert, M.T. Ockards, S. Wai SARAO, Cape Town, South Africa
	Obsolescence is one of the challenges facing all long-term projects. It not only affects hardware platforms, but also software. Python 2.x reached official End Of Life status on 1 January 2020. In this paper we review our efforts to port to the replacement, Python 3.x. While the two versions are very similar, there are important differences which can lead to incompatibility or changes in behaviour. We discuss our motivation and strategy for porting our code base of approximately 200 k source lines of code over 20 Python packages. This includes aspects such as internal and external dependencies, legacy and proprietary software that cannot be easily ported, testing and verification, and why we selected a phased approach rather than "big bang". We also report on the challenges and lessons learnt - notably why good test coverage is so important for software maintenance. Our application is the 64-antenna MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa - a precursor to the Square Kilometre Array
	Poster MOPV036 [2.277 MB]
DOI •	reference for this paper ※ https://doi.org/10.18429/JACoW-ICALEPCS2021-MOPV036
About •	Received ※ 11 October 2021 Accepted ※ 04 February 2022 Issue date ※ 03 March 2022
Cite •	reference for this paper using ※ BibTeX, ※ LaTeX, ※ Text/Word, ※ RIS, ※ EndNote (xml)

Paper

Title

Page

Porting Control System Software From Python 2 to 3 - Challenges and Lessons

217

A.F. Joubert, M.T. Ockards, S. Wai
SARAO, Cape Town, South Africa

Obsolescence is one of the challenges facing all long-term projects. It not only affects hardware platforms, but also software. Python 2.x reached official End Of Life status on 1 January 2020. In this paper we review our efforts to port to the replacement, Python 3.x. While the two versions are very similar, there are important differences which can lead to incompatibility or changes in behaviour. We discuss our motivation and strategy for porting our code base of approximately 200 k source lines of code over 20 Python packages. This includes aspects such as internal and external dependencies, legacy and proprietary software that cannot be easily ported, testing and verification, and why we selected a phased approach rather than "big bang". We also report on the challenges and lessons learnt - notably why good test coverage is so important for software maintenance. Our application is the 64-antenna MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa - a precursor to the Square Kilometre Array

Poster MOPV036 [2.277 MB]

DOI •

reference for this paper ※ https://doi.org/10.18429/JACoW-ICALEPCS2021-MOPV036

About •

Received ※ 11 October 2021 Accepted ※ 04 February 2022 Issue date ※ 03 March 2022

Cite •

reference for this paper using ※ BibTeX, ※ LaTeX, ※ Text/Word, ※ RIS, ※ EndNote (xml)