[Mailman-Developers] Python3 port of Mailman3

Hi All,

I am working on porting mailman3 to python3. There are few doubts I have which may sound stupid, but I have a little knowledge about encoding and charsets which I think is important for the port. Also this is my first time working on python3 so forgive me for asking anything obvious( I did try googling first) The code is in very preliminary stages with tons of errors. Its up on launchpad.

lp:~raj-abhilash1/mailman/py3

So my doubts:

1. pkg_resources.resource_string used to read the configuration files while initialization and testing now returns bytes instead of string(like in python2). So instead I use pkg_resources.resource_stream and deocode to the steam to a utf-8 encoding(why? to avoid errors for the time being). I wanted to ask what would be the best for this case?

2. To create a hash everywhere unicode strings must be encoded. So again the same question what should I encode it to? UTF-8 or US-ASCII? Or someway to determine which encoding should be used?

Also if anybody has suggestions on porting please let me know. I am online sporadically on irc as maxking on #mailman (I see all of the messages sent while I am away).

thanks, Abhilash Raj