mikeorr
Any reason to not update this library?
Is there any reason to not maintain this library (other than not enough time in the day)? If not, would you like help?
Looks like the library has just a couple issues/PRs that could get fixed, remove Python 2 support, and make a release?
Thanks for the offer. I just have less energy now than I did in the early 2010s when there was a big project to create Pyramid and its depndencies. The biggest things I need is to figure out the new PyPI submission procedure, which has changed dramatically since then. Do you maintain other packages? ReadTheDocs may also have changed, and I don't know if the 'pyramid-sphinx-theme' is still current. So if you could make some recommendations along those lines, and test the existing pull requests and issues and confirm they're OK, that would be great, and I'll spur myself to get back into it this week.
I don't think it should add any major new things; I've moved away from the idea of bundling a wide variety of things into one package. That was an inheritance from Pylons in 2005. Pylons came out of Myghty, a template engine/web framework with an 'h' helpers global, and Pylons imitated Ruby On Rails, which had a helpers library. So WebHelpers had a kitchen sink of utilities. When we built Pyramid we decided to keep a stripped-down helpers library (WebHelpers2) and a Pylons-like library (Akhet). Developers soon defected to Pyramid's native view paradigm (view functions or special-purpose classes rather than generic "controller classes/action methods". WebHelpers2 usage continues on, although now in Python 3.6+ some equivalents are in the Python standard library or other PyPI packages. I'm still using WebHelpers2 in my own sites, and I haven't needed much in the way of new changes.
Stripping Python 2 compatibility and 'six' seems like a large change that's unnecessary at present. I'm still supporting Python 2 sites, although they're using WebHelpers. There may be others who are still using WebHelpers2 in Python 2 programs. And since one of WebHelpers2's strong points is stability, and I don't plan to add new features, and it's less effort to keep Python 2/3 compatibility than to remove it, I'd say keep it for now. The last Python 2 release was 2.7.18, so we can drop all versions before that.
if you're interested, WebHelpers has a pull request for Python 3 compatibility. I've been reluctant to accept it because I've said all along that WebHelpers wouldn't be upgraded and it would mean supporting all the things I left of of WebHelpers2. But now that Python 2 is a zombie, it might make sense to do a last WebHelpers release with Python 2/3 compatibility. The biggest thing I'd need for that is to test the pull request and confirm it works and won't break people's applications.
