[reportlab-users] Moving to Bitbucket, and development roadmap..

[Andy Robinson]

Hi all,

First of all, I must make a general apology for our lack of attention
recently.  We get very busy most of the time, and only really get
involved with the open source code base bites us or a customer.  This
happened with the threading issue recently.

I did not even know Pillow existed until a couple of months ago.  And
it's easy to read emails on here, but quite hard to find time to go
away and study the packages or source code mentioned.  Believe it or
not, Robin and I cannot always remember what we wrote 8-12 years ago,
and we have to find time to look.

Anyway, our rough plan is as follows:

1. minor release in the next couple of weeks, the last one to support
2.5/2.6/2.7  (although we will keep a branch for important bug fixes)

2. prepare for bigger changes by
(a) removing as many lines of code as possible in terms of demos which
are no longer cool, and things the Python library does now, which it
did not do ten years ago  (like sphinx docs, and XML parsing with
celementtree).  The less lines of code, the less work we have to do.
(b) take a good look at pillow, obviously, but maybe also libpng.  We
just need to read common image formats, and it makes a lot of sense to
use libraries which can be installed with pip/easy_install on both 2.7
and 3.3.
(c) studying Hajime's previous port to Python 3.0 properly.  Apologies
again for not having found the time to do so.
(d) bringing minimum Python version up to 2.7, so we have less things
to think about and can use newer stdlib features (like the unittest
extensions)

This will involve some minor breakages of compatibility.   For
example, our current paragraph parser forgives putting
    Blah blah <font color=red>BLAH</blah>
without any quotes.  That kind of thing will have to "break".  But
hopefully it will only be stupid/ugly/wrong stuff we break.


3. Create a version which either runs cleanly with 2.7 and 3.3, or can
work and pass test suite through 2to3 / 3to2.   We will clearly have
customers and users on 2.7 for many more years, but people are
starting to ask for 3.x now.  And we do not have the resources to
maintain two separate branches.

There are many details to be worked out but we hope to get there in
some form in the next 3 months.


Best Regards,


Andy Robinson