[Image-SIG] Pillow, the "friendly" PIL fork

Fredrik Lundh fredrik at pythonware.com
Sun Aug 1 13:04:48 CEST 2010


2010/7/31 Daniel Fetchinson <fetchinson at googlemail.com>:
>> I have been wanting to tackle this for sometime, and finally got around to
>> it tonight. I've created a "friendly" fork of PIL called "Pillow":
>> http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Pillow/1.0
>>
>> Some background: I've been doing Plone development for the past 5 years or
>> so, and PIL has always "been an issue". I won't get into what the issues are
>> now, but I assume folks know them.
>
> Well, I actually don't know what the "issues" are, but am very
> interested in hearing them!

Plone exists in the Zope universe, not the Python universe, which is
an issue in itself.

In this case, I think the actual "issue" is that Zope uses its own
build system that's puts specific requirements on the distutils
packaging; requirements that are not compatible with PIL's setup file.
 Instead of just sit down and contribute a patch like everyone else
would have done, they've spent a couple of years ranting on their own
mailing lists and occasionally sending me nastygrams (including
writing reviews on PyPI telling people to stay away from the software
because if it's not convenient to use with a package system you
invented yourself, it's worthless for everyone).  At least a packaging
fork means that someone's over there is producing something more than
invectives, but I'd still prefer a patch.

</F>


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