Cqlsh throws and error when querying a duration data type

Overview

Querying duration related data from the cqlsh prompt results in an error.

Consider the following create table and insert statement.

CREATE TABLE duration_test (
  primary_key text,
  col20 duration,
  PRIMARY KEY (primary_key)
);
INSERT INTO duration_test (primary_key, col20) VALUES ('primary_key_example', 1y5mo89h4m48s);

On executing a select query on col20 in cqlsh I get an error "Failed to format value '"\x00\xfe\x02GS\xfc\xa5\xc0\x00' : 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xfe in position 2: ordinal not in range(128)"

Select  col20 from duration_test;

Investigation

On investigating this further I found that the current python Cassandra driver used found in lib/cassandra-driver-internal-only-3.7.0.post0-2481531.zip does not seem to support duration data type. This was added in Jan this year https://github.com/datastax/python-driver/pull/689.

So I downloaded the latest driver release https://github.com/datastax/python-driver/releases/tag/3.9.0. I embedded the latest driver into cassandra-driver-internal-only-3.7.0.post0-2481531.zip. This fixed the driver related issue but there was still a formatting issue.

I then went on to modify the format_value_duration methos in the pylib/cqlshlib/formatting.py. Diff posted below

 @formatter_for('Duration')
 def format_value_duration(val, colormap, **_):
-    buf = six.iterbytes(val)
-    months = decode_vint(buf)
-    days = decode_vint(buf)
-    nanoseconds = decode_vint(buf)
-    return format_python_formatted_type(duration_as_str(months, days, nanoseconds), colormap, 'duration')
+    return format_python_formatted_type(duration_as_str(val.months, val.days, val.nanoseconds), colormap, 'duration')

This resulted in fixing the issue and duration types are now correctly displayed.

Happy to fix the issue if I can get some guidance on:

1. If this is a valid issue. Tried searching JIRA but did not find anything reported.
2. If my assumptions are correct i.e. this is actually a bug
3. how to package the new driver into the source code.