Switch to Pillow?

[Christopher Allan Webber]

This has been mentioned by willkg in several previous bugs: #392 #57 (and one where someone mentioned it as a fix: #412) but maybe we should switch from PIL to Pillow; PIL seems to be better maintained: ​https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Pillow/

However, we shouldn't just make this switch without considering the implications. For example, we are currently shooting for Debian packaging, but Pillow is not packaged in Debian. Pillow is apparently backwards compatible though?

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Tsyesika points out that debian, redhat, et c seems to still be using PIL, so switching entirely over this might be an issue there.

[Simon Fondrie-Teitler]

Debian has it in the experimental version of python-imaging, however there is a bug that is stopping it from continuing. While the module is backward compatible, the import statement is not. As I say in the bug report, this is deliberate and necessary to get setuptools working.

​http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=711343

[Jessica Tallon]

CentOS 7 now has pillow, since we dropped python 2.6 support there is only the x86_64 bit version of CentOS 6 which doesn't have pillow. I suggest we go forth and switch, it seems everyone else is.

[ayleph]

I don't think this is an OS-specific issue. Pillow is available on PyPI, so regardless of what packages are available for a specific distro, one should be able to install Pillow in their mediagoblin environment using pip or easy_install. We could add this to setup.py.

[Jessica Tallon]

We can't add PIL or Pillow to setup.py without requiring the user also have gcc and other build utilities installed. Pillow (like PIL) requires some compilation (it's a mixture of C and python IIRC). We currently don't want to ask people to have those installed so we rely on the package manager to provide them.

[ayleph]

Oh, I see. Understood.

[Christopher Allan Webber]

So I think at this point, this is just a documentation change, right?

commit d0e9f843e23196f790b640327bef3718e74b0347
Author: Alon Levy <alon@pobox.com>
Date:   Mon Apr 8 11:19:56 2013 +0300

    PIL: Support systems with Pillow and without
    
    Fixes for systems with Pillow, but leaves a "try: except ImportError" to
    support anything that doesn't have a PIL top level import.
    
    Signed-off-by: Alon Levy <alon@pobox.com>

It looks like we just have to switch the documentation over to recommending Pillow and dropping references to PIL. We could then also drop support for PIL specifically in the imports; no need to support both anymore...

[Jessica Tallon]

Yep, I believe so. I actually use pillow on all my dev servers already ;)

[Ben Sturmfels]

Netbulae notes in #911 "configure: error: Python Imaging Library is required" that Fedora 20 doesn't have python-imaging and instead has python-pillow. Keeping that ticket open, since it could probably be solved simply by updating documentation.

[Ben Sturmfels]

Already switched to Pillow.