[reportlab-users] Stable and development branches created, moving to 2.3

[andy at reportlab.com]

We're about to embark on some more aggressive development
on the trunk of our repositories (both open source and private)
and I have therefore created a branch before we do so.

Stable branch: "python21-stable"
====================
The branch should be the basis for a 1.21.1 release, which I
hope we will do in June, and which will be Python 2.1 compatible.
On the branch we'll try to finish any pending issues like ImageReader,
so there MIGHT be 1.21.2, 1.21.3 bug fix branches, but that's about all.
If anyone volunteers to maintain the branch, then more stuff could
be ported to it, but we need to focus on the trunk.

Anyone who is using subversion and wants to keep a stable
environment should switch to this branch, which can be grabbed
with

   
http://www.reportlab.co.uk/svn/public/reportlab/branches/python21-stable/



Planned development on trunk
===================
Nothing amazing will happen on the trunk this week.  The branch
is more of a precaution prior to other checkins.  I am, however,
putting an assertion into the __init__.py on the trunk.

I won't promise any dates on a "version 2.0", except to say that
we are bringing a product to market which requires it, and hope to
be out with this by end of year.

We will aim to keep the trunk in a running state and passing its tests
but "things may change".  This is being primarily driven by
(a) wanting to properly handle Unicode in the core, which
doesn't require 2.3 per se but will mean we are going to change
paragraph parsing
(b) generally more robust solutions for keeping text in 'known
states' (i.e. escaped or unescaped, unicode or 8-bit)
(c) a burning desire to use many of the new features in Python 2.3
and higher such as doctest, optparse, logging, the compiler module
for certain optimisations, and possibly new-style classes for
type-safe object construction

If anyone has concerns or recommendations, please fire away.


Best Regards,


Andy Robinson
CEO/Chief Architect
ReportLab Europe Ltd.
tel +44 20 8544 8049