Taking a shot at bringing d-rats up to date. Mostly using a brute force run it and see what breaks approach. Others have taken this on. I'm leaving it for the time being at least (and probably forever). I found a few issues that are noted.
Overall our local hams don't find D-RATS all that useful. I think a larger vision is required that builds an integration framework for station management and digital communications. Trying to get all the different but useful pieces of freeware, shareware, open-source and proprietary code working together in a ham radio station is extremely frustration and lacks elegance.
pyserial 3.4 pyspellchecker 0.5.4 (spell module converted from piping to daemon to direct call)
File d_rats.platform.py collides with the Python built-in module. Worked around it by using explicit file path There may be an opportunity to use the built-in instead if there is enough overlap in function. The GTK module for the UI is difficult to install and incompatible with Python 3. Opting to use Tkinter & ttk which is a bit of a journey into the unknown. Will take it 1 day at a time. Changing everything to f-strings where I see them. Sometimes I skip over them but may loop back some day and get the rest. There's a lot of opportunities as there is a lot of string formatting (using C-like formatting) The file() function in Python 2 is gone. With it, the debug log is opened with unbuffered I/O, which is not allowed in the replacement function open() for text files. If it turns out that buffering is a problem, due to the last item of a debug log not getting written before a program crash, it might be necessary to write a custom class to flush the buffers after each write.