[reportlab-users] ReportLab 2.2 deployment options

[Andy Robinson]

Hi everyone,

We are hoping to do 2.2 in a couple of week's time.  No major features
but hopefully collect and partly-document the fixes and enhancements
since the last one 15 months ago.    I am giving a tutorial at
PyCon-UK on Friday 12th and would like to release it then or soon
after, and we should have some web pages up in a couple of days
summarising what's coming.

Two key questions today:


Q1. How badly do people want setuptools, eggs, easy_install and so on?
Is plain old distutils good enough?


Q2. Should we try to do "batteries included", with the accelerator,
optional C libraries for rendering bitmaps and the type 1 fonts
included in the basic package and one setup script to build it all?


Our worry is:  you can use a lot of functionality with just the Python
code and maybe the _rl_accel.c extension.  But if we want to put the
graphics extensions  "in the box", we introduce dependencies on
libart, freetype, libjpeg, PIL and so on.  Due to limited resources,
we'd aim to test on Ubuntu 8.04 and Windows, but we would not want to
spend our own time trying to make convoluted setup scripts work with a
gazillion distros.



Best Regards,





-- 
Andy Robinson
CEO/Chief Architect
ReportLab Europe Ltd.
165 The Broadway, Wimbledon, London SW19 1NE, UK
Tel +44-20-8544-8049