Introducing bitvector-modern, a fork of python BitVector

 About 20 years ago, I used Avi Kak's BitVector python library for my AIS work when my work was pure python as can be found in my noaadata package that I haven't done much with in more than a decade. BitVector is an awesome tool for working with arbitrarily long sequences of bits. A lot has happened in the world of python and software engineering since I donated a Makefile and helped with a bit of packaging. I decided to give a quick go at modernizing BitVector, and after about 5 hours of work, I have bitvector-modern. The function of code in BitVector basically the same at this point, but I've changed a lot that should make maintaining and using the BitVector class a lot easier. 

You can find the work here:

https://github.com/schwehr/bitvector-modern

Here are roughly the changes I've made so far with the help of Google Antigravity:

• Switch to using uv and for pyproject.toml packaging
• Setup github CI
• Switched to supporting only Python 3.13 and 3.14 (Was python 2 and 3.6)
• Use ruff for code formatting
• Use pytest test discovery
• Setup code coverage reporting
• Rename directories to "examples" and "tests"
• Get set coverage from 40% to 97%
• Remove extra documentation and tests from BitVector.py
• Remove unused _resize_pad_from_right method
• Remove backward compatibility aliases
• Use pyupgrade to get to 3.13
• Inline the testinput text files.
• Uncomment the proposed improved __add__ method and new __iadd__ method
• Setup astral-sh/ty type checking and add type annotations. There are still lots of "Any" and "..."
• Switch BitVector.__init__ from kwargs to explicitly named args
• Setup Dependabot

That leaves a lot more to do, but it's a big start! Some of what I'd like to do:

• Add an AGENTS.md
• Convert the prior documentation into a docs directory
• Convert more string formatting to f-string
• Convert the method doc strings to a more standard format with summary line, args, returns/yields, raises
• Cleanup the code inside methods
• Modernize the iterator using "yield from"
• Tighten the type annotations
• Allow pathlib.Path file references
• Replace deep_copy with python’s
• Fix the interface to set_value
• Use a better random number generator than python's random package
• Setup releases on github
• Add the package to PyPI

After that, I need to modernize noaadata and get it using bitvector-modern.