PIL questions: still supported? Problems on 2.7 for win? alternatives?

[Gelonida N]

Hi,

I'm trying to migrate a project with legacy code from 2.6 (with PIL 
1.1.6) to 2.7 with (PIL 1.1.7)
The SW should run on Windows.


PIL fails with an error concering '_imagingft'
This seems to be a known issue.

http://code.google.com/p/pythonxy/issues/detail?id=300
and the bug was never closed.

One suggestion is to download an alternative build from a non official site.

Looking at the activity of PIL ( 
http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/index.htm ) it seems, that 
development stopped,
The latest build (with known bugs and missing functionality for python 
2.7.) seems to be from November 15, 2009.
In the net I read, that there's so little activity on PIL, because it's 
stable, which doesn't seem to be the case for the 2.7 binary package.

This all does not sound very comforting. Why is there no fix on the 
official site?

I wondered whether some of you have a little more insight into what's 
going on with PIL.

Short term: get PIL working on 2.7 windows?
----------------------------------------------------
My shortterm problem is migrating existing code to 2.7 and keeping the 
code, that uses PIL.
So I'll probably try to install the custom binary, but would like to 
know whether anybody has experience with this build.
http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#pil

Alternatively how tricky is PIL to be compiled with mingw?



Mid term: What to use to manipulate images?
--------------------------------------------

My midterm problem is to stay with Python 2.7 and to write occasinally 
new code, that does some basic image manipulations.

Can I still count on PIL? The fact, that the official devs don't even 
bother to fix some basic functionality of their binary release tells me 
that either very few people use PIL (or at least the broken 
functionality somehow related to the font libraries) on 2.7

What alternatives do exist for PIL?
We just need some lines drawn, some text drown, some scaling, 
transparency merging, . . . and PIL seend decent enough.

There seems to be freeimagepy, but the bindings seem to be 'only' ctypes 
bindings http://freeimagepy.sourceforge.net/
Any experience with this libraries?

Any other suggestions?



Longterm Will PIL officially exist for Python 3?
-------------------------------------------------

When really all libraries that the project  needs are supported
I''ll probably migrate to Python 3.

For Python 3 there is not even a broken official release, but only forks.

Why isn't any of these forks becoming 'official'?

If a package is not supported for Windows via official binary releases / 
easy_install, then I'm a little more afraid, that the package 
(maintainers included) will disappear in the near future.

Thanks a lot in advance for opinions / recommendations / clarifications