@slev this is my take on it. I pulled your PYTHON abstraction and better way to handle the sys.stdout.write change in tests/038-ms-v2-template/extract-extdata.py but otherwise they are very similar.

@rcritten, my version included only the minimal required changes (for possible backports).
I understand that you replaced tabs with spaces, but this mangles the target changes.
I would move indentation switch to a separate commit, but of course, this is up to you ;-)

Another difference is that Element.getchildren() method is deprecated:
https://docs.python.org/3/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html#xml.etree.ElementTree.Element.getchildren

There are warnings about it in 028-dbus/actual.err.

Changes applied.

• Dropped all non-necessary reformatting (this is more minimal than yours)
• droped refs to getchildren
• I had a sed to replace dates with the string "date", I dropped that
• Improved commit message

:thumbsup: looks great.
Thank you!