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

[Fredrik Lundh]

2010/8/1 Christopher Barker <Chris.Barker at noaa.gov>:

> I'd be a bit happier if "import Image" raised a deprecation warning, but I'm
> not sure how you'd do that. (I actually did help do that for the GDAL
> package, but that was set up differently - they actually had all their stuff
> dumped directly into site-packages).

Me neither, but having that as an installatoin option wouldn't be all
bad.  But I could start by going through the documentation on
effbot.org and make sure it recommends "from PIL" more clearly (the
current documentation uses both form).

> But it's not hard to have ZOPE remove the pth file if that's what you want.
>
> And when it comes down to it, there is no way to remove all possible name
> clashes --every package has to have a top-level name -- if ZOPE used a
> package called "PIL", you'd still have a clash.

Indeed, and as I mentioned earlier, PIL does in fact predate Zope, and
grabbed the "Image*" prefix long before they released their first
version :)

(strangely enough, I don't remember this being much of a problem for
the first decade or so.  Could be that it's something with the latest
crop of installation tools that messes things up, but I'm not
following the developments over there that closely; last time I
checked, most of the tools appeared to conflate setting up development
environments with distributing software to client machines and/or
pushing to production environments, and most of them also seem to
ignore that the latter two are solved problems on many platforms...)

> But python does allow the "import as" construction, so you can always patch
> your own systems by changing the name of a package.
>
> My tiny nit about "standards":
>
> Having a __version__ attribute is a very common convention, if not a
> standard -- it would be nice if PIL supported it -- and that's a trivial
> patch:

I was about to say "but doesn't 1.1.7 have that?" only to find that it
doesn't.  Just fixed this omission in trunk.

</F>