[Discussion] Future of mpld3

[jakevdp]

It's no secret that mpld3 has stalled. There hasn't been a release in a long time. I created it, but am not in a place to act as its maintainer & release manager. But the current state of affairs leaves the user in limbo, particularly with regards to the many issues and PRs that keep streaming in.

So we need to decide what to do. I see a few options:

• one of the current maintainers commits to leading the support & release effort
• seek help from the community: there may be someone interested in taking this on if we reach out
• officially declare the project unsupported, and make sure that fact is prominent on the github repo and documentation

Let me know what you think. cc/ @aflaxman @jgbos @danielballan @etgalloway

[danielballan]

I'm not in a place to take on mpld3 dev effort either, but I'd be glad to help reach out to the community if that is the course we decide to take.

[etgalloway]

If there are no other volunteers, I would be willing to commit to managing a v0.3 release.

As I see it, v0.3 would be git master + a few easy fixes.

What (at minimum) is standing in the way of a release?

• Failing JS tests for d3 3.14.13 & 3.5.12
• Failing mplexporter tests

For the JS tests: PR #376 provides a fix for d3 3.4.13; a PR for 3.5.12 is in the works.

For mplexporter: Currently, for matplotlib 1.4/1.5, 3 out of 14 tests fail, as discussed in mpld3/mplexporter#29. @danielballan has provided a fix for test_path_collection (mpld3/mplexporter#42). test_image was agreed to be a won't fix (in mplexporter#29). The fix for test_legend_dots appears to be fairly straightforward.

Is there anything else worth fixing?

[jakevdp]

That would be great, @etgalloway!

The other big thing is the fact that there are no automated JS tests for interactions. The last couple times I tried to release, I got halted by JS bugs that had snuck through in PRs, because eveything is very inter-related and brittle 😢

The other issue is the need to simultaneously release new JS libs, and make sure all the various version references are correct. I've tried to outline all the necessary steps in RELEASING.md

[aflaxman]

+1 for @etgalloway to get v0.3 released!