Only 2 months after lxml 0.9 was released, Stefan Behnel announced lxml 1.0 last week. This is a major milestone in the history of this still young project which I’ve had the pleasure to accompany since its birth.
History
Our own (“our” as in the “Zope community’s”) Martijn Faassen announced his intent on working on a Pythonic wrapper for libxml/libxslt in a lightning talk at EuroPython 2004. Around this time we moved the code he had so far to codespeak.net (where, among others, PyPy is hosted) and created a public repository, mailinglists and a website for it, so that the project was more visible. It wasn’t until April 2005, though, that Martijn released a first 0.5 version. That’s when the project finally picked up some speed.
Stefan Behnel joined half a year later, in October 2005. We soon had to give him check-in rights because he provided numerous patches on a regular basis. Once equipped with repository access, he started hacking away on various features which were all integrated after lxml 0.8 was released. All features (and the majority of the bugfixes) after lxml 0.8 are basically his work. This is half of the changelog.
Last month, Martijn Faassen made Stefan the official maintainer of lxml and basically set into stone what had been reality already for half a year.
Kudos
Kudos to Martijn Faassen for providing enough technical insight (to choose the ElementTree API and libxml/libxslt as a basis), ingenuity and “open source entrepeneurship” to start this project and to ensure the longevity of the project. He did this with another project around the same time, by the way. I wonder what project he’ll start next :).
Kudos to Stefan Behnel for doing all the work he has done. It’s not only the amount of work, though. He has been and continues to be very responsive when people provide bug reports. It’s not unusual that the svn repository will have a fix the same day that a bug is reported. He also invests a lot of time into careful benchmarks and code analyses. All this is far beyond the typical commitment of an open source developer.
Kudos to Frederik Lundh, not only for coming up with ElementTree in the first place, but also for being supportive of lxml (given that lxml is a friendly competitor, but a competitor nonetheless). He is active on the lxml mailinglist, gives useful advice and watches over incompatibility issues.
Kudos to all users of lxml who have reported many bugs over the past months and have helped out a lot building Windows releases and such.
Now, that’s enough warm fuzzies for one day. Let’s get back to work.
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