that it would be very inefficient to do general porting work when any
attempt to even run the test suite would run straight into the same crashes
in the same order, so I set myself a target of getting the test suite to
-start up, and started hacking on an enormous git branch that I never
+start up, and started hacking on an [enormous git
+branch](https://git.launchpad.net/~cjwatson/launchpad?h=py3) that I never
expected to try to land directly: instead, I felt free to commit just about
anything that looked reasonable and moved things forward even if it was very
rough, and every so often went back to tidy things up and cherry-pick