On Sun, Jul 12, 2009 at 8:30 PM, David Joyner<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I have some comment below but would like to first make some general
> observations.
> Certainly I am not the expert on image processing but I have now spent
> a week or 2 on
> PIL. I know others have spoken in favor of PIL (I think Jason Grout
> and maybe some others)
> and that motivated me to spend some time writing this module. I do think the
> module will be of use to those who want to use or learn PIL in the
> context of Sage. I worked
> on it thinking that with it, PIL could be made a standard part of
> Sage. However, I am no
> longer convinced that this is the best idea. I'm still thinking about
> this issue, so can't
> say anything definitive at the moment, but from what little I know, I
> think VIPS might be a
> better alternative
> (http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk/index.php?title=VIPS). The library
> is LGPL, and the size of the sourve is about 3M. Also, it is faster
> than the other open
> source alternatives according to one set of tests
> http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk/index.php?title=Speed_and_Memory_Use
> Therefore, I think VIPS should be looked into further. Also, the VIPS binary
> (and NIPS, the associated GUI) is available for many common linux
> distributions.
>
> There is nothing wrong with PIL and it provides good basic functionality.
> However, I think I will look into VIPS more carefully before making a
> definite recommendation about what to include with Sage, as far as
> image processing
> goes.
So what are the arguments against PIL and for VIPS?
What I hate about PIL is the lack of docstrings with example doctests.
But honestly, I hate this about Python standard library too!
Things like this:
In [1]: a = "s"
In [4]: a.format?
Type: builtin_function_or_method
Base Class: <type 'builtin_function_or_method'>
String Form: <built-in method format of str object at 0x7f25b1ba7a80>
Namespace: Interactive
Docstring:
S.format(*args, **kwargs) -> unicode
The docstring is utterly useless.
I just got used to having thorough docstrings + doctests and imho Sage
raised a bar here and hopefully other will follow too. And a lack of
online documentation too, where sphinx raised a bar. PIL has this:
http://www.pythonware.com/library/pil/handbook/index.htm
which is not bad, but sphinx is better.
Ondrej
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