[Biopython-dev] PIL/Pillow import, was: Testings on Win 7 x64

[Peter Cock]

On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 5:49 PM, Peter Cock <p.j.a.cock at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 5:34 PM, Manlio Calvi <manlio.calvi at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Second a more general signalation, I've seen some test depends on PIL
>> but PIL library get discontinued and substituted by one called Pillow
>> that is said compatible with it predecessor (but I'm not sure how much
>> it is). This is a more general issue because require an scan of the
>> entire codebase. Looking around seems to me the NLTK package is in a
>> situation like this, too.
>
> That probably refers to test_GraphicsBitmaps.py which is trying to
> check if ReportLab will be able to make PNG files. If ReportLab
> can now use Pillow or PIL, we should allow for that...
> https://github.com/python-imaging/Pillow
>
> (As an aside ReportLab's Python 3 support is still quite new -
> but I don't recall seeing any problems from Biopython's usage
> of it.)

During Debian packaging Andreas Tille had to tweak Biopython 1.63
to work nicely with Pillow (which does seem to have effectively
taken over from the older PIL project):
http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-med/trunk/packages/python-biopython/trunk/debian/patches/biopython-from-pil-import-image.patch?revision=16855&view=markup

I've made the following (hopefully) backwards compatible change:
https://github.com/biopython/biopython/commit/3c2a2f683d766d43964e7271e90c28c16be3b06e

Peter