Maintainer application — starting with a Python 3 pass over the examples

[Abhayindia]

Maintainer application

Hi @hamishwillee I'd like to help keep DroneKit-Python alive, and I've tried to lead with work rather than just interest.

I've already got one PR open here: #1253, which removes an undeclared past.builtins import that breaks a fresh install on Python 3. That's the kind of thing I'd like to keep chipping at.

What I'm offering

I've read through #1228 and #1196, so I know the position: you've said DroneKit is your last priority and that you'll match concrete commitment where you see it, and that a good starting point is to "work through all the examples with Python 3... fix both as you go docs examples and DK python."

That's exactly what I'd like to take on. Concretely:

• Work through all 15 examples (channel_overrides through vehicle_state) against ArduPilot SITL on current Python 3.
• For each one: run it, record what breaks, and submit a fix either to the example, to the docs (which still carry Python 2 idioms), or to dronekit itself where the example is exposing a real bug.
• Submit these as small, separately reviewable PRs rather than one large one, so they're easy to look at in whatever time you have.

I'd rather earn commit access by doing the work than ask for it up front. If the examples sweep is useful and you'd like me to keep going, I'm happy to take on issue triage next @morzack's point in #1228 was that a good number of open issues would be cleared by a release, and a pass to confirm which ones would make that release easier to justify. (PyPI is still serving 2.9.2 from March 2019, with no requires_python, which I suspect is behind a fair share of the 446 open issues.)

Background

I'm @Abhayindia. My open-source work is mostly correctness fixes in C++, Python and Rust recent merged contributions include QuantLib (numerical edge cases in pricing engines), MuJoCo (URDF mimic-joint handling), uber/h3 (integer-overflow guards) and chainladder-python. I work with MAVLink-adjacent systems and have SITL available for testing; I don't have flight hardware, same limitation @morzack noted.

No expectations about access happy to just start on the examples if that's useful. Let me know if you'd rather I sequence it differently.

[Abhayindia]

sweep done - all 15 examples run against dronekit-sitl copter (APM:Copter 3.3). 5 pass, 2 are environment-gated rather than repo bugs (drone_delivery's deps are declared in its own requirements.pip; follow_me needs the documented Linux gpsd), and 6 hang on one shared root cause which I isolated and wrote up on #1082: the 2015 SITL answers MAV_CMD_DO_SET_MODE with MAV_RESULT_UNSUPPORTED, dronekit never inspects the ack, and the examples' wait loops have no timeout.
two small PRs so far as promised: #1256 (Ch4 override was 4100 not 410, plus the docs sample output, still carrying Python-2 dict ordering) and #1257 (from Tkinter import *, and a segfault from touching Tk widgets on dronekit's MAVLink thread - isolated by disabling the observers). play_tune is a third, separate one: play_tune_encode exists only in the MAVLink 2 dialects and the bundled SITL negotiates v1.