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

[Sandro Mani]

On 28.12.2012 17:14, José Matos wrote:
> 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. :-)
>
I've written a feature page for the PIL->Pillow switch here [1].

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Pillow