G2-1700 Add support for external polling without background polling

[gdgib]

See #238 for a description of why, but the bottom line is that this should allow HA integration to use its own polling, which will improved responsiveness. I'm still testing, of course.

[gdgib]

Again @jeeftor I'm not sure what you'd want to do here, the CI failures don't appear related to my changes. I can fix them, but I guess I'd want to do that in another PR. Let me know if you want that.

[gdgib]

This definitely works well. The state of the fireplace now updates instantly when I change it through HA, and there are much fewer unexpected sensor changes. Before this PR if I turned the flame on it would read as on, then off for a bit, then on again as the polling intervals lined up. With this PR, state change reporting works as expected.

[jeeftor]

I just hit approve-and run I guess that was the issue. I really need to pull my module and see if it can re-set - however - if you want to join the project and mine doesnt come back to life I'm willing to talk about it as well :)

[gdgib]

I'm seeing the commit check failures, a lot of which pre-date my work. Feels like cleaning those up (in a separate PR) is a starting place.

As for joining the project I'm definitely on board. Really anything to help. You did an excellent job with this code, and I'd hate to leave you in the middle of maintaining code you can't test, and maybe isn't a priority for you. As a total extreme measure, I'd even be willing to make https://github.com/haext/intellifire4py the primary fork and give you maintainer permissions over there in the even that you want to slowly bow out of maintaining this code. I created the haext org specifically for situations like this - when someone moves on from code having a github organization allows us to add new people as maintainers without having to change which fork is current. Heck, I'd be happy to make you a maintainer there for now, remove you as a maintainer temporarily, or even remove myself as a maintainer if that's what you want. Like I said, that's all pretty extreme, but if your module is dead I guess I want you to know I'd be happy to step up and lighting your load either permanently or temporarily in any way.

In the meantime, I think the next step for me is cleaning up the linting errors in a separate PR, so we can get things moving without errors.

[gdgib]

Related question: should I think about version updates? There are a lot of version bump PRs, and I'd be happy to test them.

[jeeftor]

I'm mid-refactor but then I found this PR... I forgot about it :) ... I'll see about pulling it in

[jeeftor]

I'm finally rev viewing this today

[jeeftor]

Had AI rewrite your PR to the latest codebase: #315