tests fail on Python 3 because of 'basestring'

[ror6ax]

Running test suite on Python 3.6 leads to

======================================================================
ERROR: test_CustomResource (tests.test_examples.TestExamples)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/ror6ax/troposphere/.eggs/awacs-0.7.2-py3.6.egg/tests/test_examples.py", line 21, in test_file
    exec(code)
  File "examples/CustomResource.py", line 6, in <module>
    class CustomPlacementGroup(AWSCustomObject):
  File "examples/CustomResource.py", line 10, in CustomPlacementGroup
    'ServiceToken': (basestring, True),
NameError: name 'basestring' is not defined

[DrLuke]

That's because you have to manually convert it to python3 code before running the test. The Makefile isn't complete in that regard. Check the .travis.yml file to see how to do that.

[cwgem]

I hate to dig up a rather well age thread, but Python 2.7 is EOL in January of 2020, giving a year before it's no longer officially supported. There doesn't seem to be any reasonable need to keep things at python 2 any longer. Instead of using a script to generate a python 3 version it feels like master should be converted to python 3 and continue from there.

[DrLuke]

I agree with this. If Python 3.5 is taken as the minimum version (which is really reasonable in my opinion), type hinting can be built directly into the generated code, which would (in my opinion) greatly improve the usability of troposphere in an IDE.
This issue should be closed and a new one opened.