Switch from mprpc to a maintained alternative

[doronbehar]

Issue Description

I'm not using this package directly, but rather I'm the downstream maintainer of uhd at Nixpkgs. When I build uhd on our platform with Python API and utilities enabled, I notice this usrp_hwd.py script that depends on mprpc (also mentioned during the cmake phase). The author of mprpc recommends to use gRPC instead. I noticed that mprpc doesn't compile on Python > 3.8 due to longintrepr.h file included there that has been renamed since Python3.8.

Excuse me for not filling exactly the bug report, as this is not exactly a bug report.

Additional Information

Perhaps relevant is our attempt to fix our UHD Python API support at NixOS/nixpkgs#307435 .

[mbr0wn]

@doronbehar Thanks for reaching out. We do want to replace mprpc with something else, but that's a lot of work -- short-term, we might simply have to disable all uses of mprpc.

[doronbehar]

Fine with me, I just want to distribute our uhd package with all of it's scripts fully working, and that's not possible if we don't (and we won't because it is deprecated) package mprpc. Currently I commented about that in our Nix expression:

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/307435/files#diff-34786da75d31da49632cde89a31fe4b87e378c96bba22353049c654f40dc2b1eR76

So nothing is urgent from our side.

[mbr0wn]

Thanks for providing that feedback!