Add How PTable is different from Prettytable to readme

[oemmerson]

As an existing Prettytable user I need information as to why you forked it and, how you are different, new features, etc.

Please could you add this to the readme? It would help existing users like me to decide to switch.

Thanks

[briancline]

My guess is due to PrettyTable not seeing any maintenance for several years (was nearly a year or so when this fork came into existence), and the long list of bugs and feature requests that accumulated over time. PTable seems to provide a backwards-compatible API to the defunct PrettyTable while fixing bugs and adding improvements.

Luke Maurits, the original PrettyTable author, wrote a farewell blog in Jan 2016, handing off the project to the OpenStack folks. However, OpenStack decided not to maintain it and instead rehomed the project under the Jazzband umbrella at @jazzband/prettytable (though they still maintain the PyPI presence).

Despite all this, PrettyTable has had no functional improvements since 2014, so is effectively a defunct project. It's unclear whether any of the Jazzband community, OpenStack, or @flaper87 have any plans for it beyond keeping Luke's original code in the Jazzband repo and a few sdist tarballs out on PyPI.

Sadly, a lot of projects that have used PrettyTable over the years but encountered issues with it probably moved on to other alternatives that are still maintained (like PTable), and I would guess most are unlikely ever to switch back at this point.

[hugovk]

Thanks for the history lesson, good to know!

(Archived version of Luke's farewell blogpost.)

By the way, upstream PrettyTable has been revived and had recent releases this month.

• https://pypi.org/project/prettytable/
• https://github.com/jazzband/prettytable