[mapserver-dev] Python MapScript

[Seth G]

Hi list,

I'd like to continue the push in cleaning up the Python MapScript bindings,  and getting a release to PyPi (for Python 2 and 3). 
There are a number of things that can be removed as part of this, but I'd like to get opinions, points of view, and clarifications on a few things. 

- as I understand it the GD rendered has been removed since v7.0 of MapServer. This means the "USE_GD" flag will always be 0, and therefore the pygdioctx additional code can be removed? https://github.com/mapserver/mapserver/blob/master/mapscript/python/pygdioctx/pygdioctx.h#L50
- cmake is now used to build the Python bindings so (please correct any incorrect assumptions) all the custom code in https://github.com/mapserver/mapserver/blob/master/mapscript/python/setup.py is now redundant, and a much simpler setup.py can be written to create wheels to upload to PyPI. 
- Python3 bindings only seem to work correctly with newer versions of SWIG. Is there any minimum we need to support? The C# ones only seem to compile with 1.3.x - but fixing this doesn't seem insurmountable. Ideally we can say only v3+ is officially supported. 
- The Python MapScript README is now 11 years old and refers to Python 2.2 - this can be extensively rewritten, and published as part of a PyPI release. 

Does the above warrant a RFC?

Regards,

Seth

--
web:http://geographika.co.uk
twitter: @geographika