Re: API changes for stringtemplate and required python version

[Peter Simons]

Hi Filippo,

thank you very much for your efforts.

 > stringtemplate3-3.1-py2.5.egg seems to have changed api and now wants
 > a "file" kwarg fileobject instead of fileName:

I wasn't aware of that. Arch Linux ships PyStringTemplate version 3.2b1;
that's the one I've been using. Anyway, since the necessary changes are
really minor, I'd be in favor of supporting the earlier version, too. If
it's alright for you, then please commit your changes to the 'maint'
branch.

Generally speaking, I am inclined to drop StringTemplate from the
formatter scripts altogether. The language is beautiful and I'm quite
fond of it, but it isn't well suited for the job at hand.

StringTemplate is good at formatting a well-defined set of data types
into different output formats. The Archive doesn't really need that
capability, though. What we need is to generate just one output format
-- say texinfo --, but we need to generate that in very high quality.
It's my impression that this is easier accomplished in plain Python code
than in StringTemplate. Besides, StringTemplate is not particularly
fast.

 > python's textwrap is got break_on_hyphens only on 2.6

This is unpleasant, because there are several distributions that ship
Python 2.4 or 2.5 by default. I'd like the code to work with those
versions, too. I'll try to figure out a way to remedy this problem. In
any case, the current limitation should be documented in NOTES, so
please commit that change, too.

Take care,
Peter