[reportlab-users] LGPL dependency - chardet

[Josiah Kane]

Hello,

The current version of reportlab has a mandatory dependency on a library called "chardet" for guessing character encodings.
Chardet is released under the LGPL. This is a more restrictive license than the BSD license used by reportlab. It effectively prohibits using reportlab to those unable to comply with the lgpl. 

There is another popular library for addressing the character encodings called charset_normalizer (https://pypi.org/project/charset-normalizer/), which is released under a more permissive MIT license. It offers a compatibility interface with chardet, such that the only code changes required should be switching the module name. According to the author's tests, charset_normalizer also runs faster and supports more encodings. As a proxy for general popularity, according to https://piptrends.com/compare/charset-normalizer-vs-chardet, charset_normalizer is  downloaded approximately ten times more frequently than chardet. 

Would there be any openness to swapping out the dependency? 

Thanks
Josiah Kane
Josiah Kane
Principal Algorithm Engineer
josiah.kane at refeyn.com
+447474509563
+44 (0)1865 203956 
Refeyn Ltd, Unit 9, Trade City Oxford, Sandy Lane West, Oxford, OX4 6FF, UK
www.refeyn.com
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