[reportlab-users] Reportlab News

[Andy Robinson]

> Anyway, I hope all this is of use.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Rasjid.

Thanks very much indeed for this.  I am very sorry to 
Rasjid and anyone else inconvenienced by our "web site 
bugs".  

I ought also to explain why these things are happening...

ReportLab have grown recently from 5 people up to about
8 full time.  We are, finally, able to have some people
who don't spend all their time on consulting projects,
and are beginning to do get organised for more core
development and support. We've also taken on a support 
manager, who is not a Pythonista (yet) but is supposed to 
get regular processes organised. We are moving to larger
premises. It will take until the end of October before our 
own infrastructure is in place.  

As soon as we finish the move,  which should be in  the next 2 
weeks., we expect to have a bench of "clean machines" for 
testing and the procedures to restore them to a known state 
(e.g. with Ghost/VMware). This will make testing much much 
easier.  It should be possible to test everything properly
on all the main platforms before a major release.

Also, the new site should make it much easier to run test 
suites nightly in a place all of you can see, at least
on Unix, and put up reference files.

We're now having to cope with 
- Python 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, Jython, 
- Acrobat Reader 4/5/6
- Windows Mac OS 9/X, FreeBsd, Linux etc.
- urgently needing to support more font models

Multiply all those together and you have a lot of
possibilities.  Python 2.3, our work on Jython, and
a contract with a customer on Mac OS 9 have all found
little wrinkles that need minor changes.  There are
also lots of dependent libraries and encoding/platform
issues which might cause changes at the boundaries.

To try and cope in a sane way, we are focussing on 
predictability and stability. We are first trying to make
an "invariant mode" which really works, so a certain
script could be guaranteed to give the same PDF output
on all platforms.  A side effect of this hacking is
that the daily builds have some weird stuff going on...

We are also trying to add some more more test suite 
furniture, so the tests that matter run on each platform, 
and the others are disabled quietly.  Once we've done that 
it should be possible to

(a) run a batch of PDFs on one machine, check they
all print and go through Distiller, Ghostscript etc.

(b) note their checksums in some kind of manifest
shipped with a snapshot of the code

(c) check we get the same files out on all other
platforms - or indeed give all users a healthcheck
utility.

In the meantime, 1.18 is the stable release. Only
the brave or those wishing to help with invariant
support should be grabbing daily snapshots...


I'll keep you all posted - thanks for your patience!

Best Regards,

Andy Robinson
CEO/Chief Architect
ReportLab Europe Ltd.