[reportlab-users] Python 3.x progress

[Andy Robinson]

Hi everyone,

More progress towards Python 3.3 compatibility, and some tentative
decisions.  Shout now if any of these worry you.

Many of the failing tests now relate to old demos or documentation
tools I would prefer to simply get rid of.  After some debate
internally about "using docutils" versus "eating our own dogfood", we
want to keep the User Guide, which makes itself in PDF with no
external dependencies, as it is our best test and a compelling demo.

I am suggesting that we leave some things out of the next version...

1. Drop the auto-generated library reference (which walks through
docstrings in a very weird manner).  Replace it with Sphinx
documentation.
2. Drop the auto-generated graphics reference and replace with some
Sphinx extension to the above.  It's just easier to browse this stuff
on the web
3. Drop Pythonpoint, then possibly rebuild it later using new parser technology.

We are hoping we might make an Ubuntu cut-off in February to get into 14.04.

Other suggestions are welcome for "dead code" we could throw away.

There is a separate issue on parsers used for paragraph content.  This
will involve a choice about backwards compatibility.  The ideal
engineering solution would be to demand strictly well-formed XML
fragments when you construct a paragraph, and might punish anyone
using ReportLab to print unquoted data.  But that will be another post
in a few days.


- Andy