Pillow, actively developed and (mostly) python3 compatible PIL (python-imaging)

[José Matos]

On 12/23/2012 02:45 AM, Sandro Mani wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> Working on a python project using PIL, and wanting to port it to
> python3, I got bitten by the absence of a python3 compatible PIL.
> Doing some research, there seems to be an actively developed PIL fork,
> called Pillow, which can be found here [1]. It describes itself as
> ----
> Pillow is the "friendly" PIL fork. PIL is the Python Imaging Library.
> Pillow was
> started for and is currently maintained by the Plone community. But it
> is used by
> many other folks in the Python web community, and probably elsewhere too.
>
> The fork author's goal is to foster packaging improvements via:
>
> - Publicized development and solicitation of community support.
> - Exploration of packaging problems within the fork, most noticably
>   via adding setuptools support but also via clean up & refactoring
>   of packaging code.
> ----
> Now, the PIL project has been rather inactive lately (last release in
> 2009), and there seems to be some general agreement that Pillow is a
> likely candidate to succeed PIL, and in particular to bring python3
> support see the discussion at [2] and [3]. Now, there already seems to
> have been some discussion about adopting it in Fedora (at least, it
> was mentioned in [4]), and I'd like to bring up the issue again.
>
> I've packaged the latest Pillow release (1.7.8) here [5], based on the
> python-imaging package, and the state is the following
> - Compiles for both python2 and python3, both variants pass the
> self-tests
> - Python 3 support is all upstream code, except for pysane, which I
> needed to patch (and I'll propose the changes upstream once github is
> back alive)
> - Python 2 looks like a drop-in replacement for PIL, except that you
> need to write i.e. "from PIL import Image" instead of directly "import
> Image" (the latter was allowed only by a PIL.pth file in the
> site-packages dir, and looked like a hack anyway - with the changes
> for python3 compatibility, the files in the PIL directory use relative
> imports, and hence the "import Image" does not work anymore, one could
> still patch away the relative imports in the python2 variant for 100%
> compatibility though)
> - Note: because of what I think is a nasty python3-distutils bug
> (shared-library extension incorrect, see [6]) I needed to patch a file
> in the python3 distutils modules for the package to compile, see [7].
>
> So, since Pillow seems to be the most likely candidate for
> python3-imaging, the questions are:
> - Do we want Pillow to succeed PIL in Fedora?
>   * According to [3], it is likely that Pillow will soon become an
> "unfriendly fork" of PIL, so Pillow-PIL compatibility is likely to
> break in the future
>   * But still being compatible at the moment, I'd say it would be
> easier to make the transition now
> - Python2 and 3, or only the python-3 variant?
> - Plus some packaging questions for the maintainers (I could
> co-maintain if desired):
>   * Keep the package name?
>   * Need new review request?
>
>
> - Sandro
>
>
> [1] https://github.com/python-imaging/Pillow/
> [2] http://mail.python.org/pipermail/image-sig/2012-October/007059.html
> [3] http://mail.python.org/pipermail/image-sig/2012-December/007120.html
> [4] http://mail.python.org/pipermail/image-sig/2012-October/007099.html
> [5] http://smani.fedorapeople.org/python-imaging-1.7.8-1.fc19.src.rpm
> [6] http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2012-December/123278.html
> [7] http://smani.fedorapeople.org/python3.3-so_ext.patch

FWIW I have been considering changing the source code to pillow ever
since pillow appeared. :-)

If we make the switch we should do it all the way.

The unfriendly aspect of the fork is due to the fact that pillow will
have more features that PIL.

This is IMHO. :-)

-- 
José Matos