Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for uTidylib

Two years ago, I've taken over uTidylib maintainership. Two years has passed without any bigger contribution, but today there is a new version with support for recent html-tidy and Python 3.

The release still can't be uploaded to PyPI (see https://github.com/pypa/warehouse/issues/4860), but it's available for download from my website or tagged in the GitHub repository.

Full list of changes is quite small:

• Compatibility with html-tidy 5.6.0.
• Added support for Python 3.

Anyway as I can not update PyPI entry, the downloads are currently available only on my website: https://cihar.com/software/utidylib/

Several years ago I've complained about uTidylib not being maintained upstream. Since that time I've occasionally pushed some fixes to my GitHub repository with uTidylib code, but without any clear intentions to take it over.

Time has gone and there was still no progress and I started to consider becoming upstream maintainer as well. I quickly got approval from Cory Dodt, who was the original author of this code, unfortunately he is not owner of the PyPI entry and the claim request seems to have no response (if you know how to get in touch with "cntrlr" or how to take over PyPI module please let me know).

Anyway the amount of patches in my repository is big enough to warrant new release. Additionally Debian bug report about supporting new HTML tidy library came in and that made me push towards releasing 0.3 version of the uTidylib.

As you might guess, the amount of changes against original uTidylib is quite huge, to name the most important ones:

• Various compatiblity fixes (eg. with 64-bit machines)
• Various code cleanups
• New test suite
• New documentation
• Support for new HTML 5 tidy library

Anyway as I can not update PyPI entry, the downloads are currently available only on my website: https://cihar.com/software/utidylib/

uTidyLib is definitely something you would call a dead project - no new release for seven years, dozens of open bugs and submitted patches and no active development. On the other side it is still used by several packages in Debian, thus worth maintaining. This is also reason, why there are few crucial patches in Debian repository to make it work (for example on 64-bit architectures).

While googling whether there is something new going on with uTidyLib, I've noticed two efforts. One is PyTidyLib, a complete reimplementation, which provides different API and thus does not seem to be used anywhere yet.

Another (well almost two years old, but I did not look earlier) effort is to fork in on Github and make it work with MacOS X. Okay, when somebody took the "effort", lets try to merge Debian patches there, hopefully there will be a release sometimes. So here is the pull request.

Update: I've just learned, there is another fork going on - https://github.com/lachlan-00/utidylib2