Match functionality provided by the javascript library

[jguthmiller]

This PR aims to improve interoperability between the python and javascript implementations. There is still a compatibility issue with encoding/decoding custom properties on features, but that fix will most likely need to be made on the javascript side.

[jlaine]

Hi Jake! I'm guessing the maintainers will find this PR hard to review as it mixes a number of unrelated code changes.

As a starting point : maybe the PEP8 changes could go in first (with no behaviour change) in a separate PR. It might be worth adding a flake8 run to the test suite too.

[jlaine]

Removing topobuf support seems fair, as it was removed from the JS implementation over two years ago:

mapbox/geobuf@b4ba6ef

The README file needs updating though.

[sgillies]

@jguthmiller this project isn't actively maintained and I'm not able to take on a 2.0 release. If pygeobuf is important to your work, we could discuss transferring the stewardship of this project and its name on PyPI to you and you could take the lead for 2.0. What do you think about that @mourner?

[mourner]

I would love to transfer the ownership to someone who depends on this module! At first I made pygeobuf purely as a proof of concept before attempting a full JS reimplementation simply because Python had good protobuf bindings at the time, but I only intend to maintain the JavaScript version now.

[jlaine]

Sounds good, Jake how about co-maintaining the project together?

[jguthmiller]

The organization I work for (mySidewalk) would definitely be interested in continuing maintenance of this project. We're running a javascript frontend and a python backend, so it'll be in our best interests to make sure that both libraries continue to play well together.

[sgillies]

@jguthmiller that's a very nice offer. I'm going to check our project hand-over checklist and report back here with next steps.

[sgillies]

@jguthmiller can you give me a PyPI username that you would like to use to upload packages to https://pypi.python.org/pypi/geobuf ? I'll add the required role.

After the repo is handed over, you can set the username and password in the Travis CI settings to automate releases as I recently did in this project.

[jlaine]

Same here @wemap uses pygeobuf to store pre-clustered data in tile form, which is why I've been offering to maintain the package for over 6 months.

[jlaine]

Hi Jake, would you mind splitting out the PEP8 changes so that we can merge those first?

[jlaine]

Hi Jake!

I've merged your PEP8 changes, could you possibly rebase this pull request ?

[jguthmiller]

Sorry for the wait, but the PR has been rebased.

[jlaine]

Awesome thanks Jake! I'm quite happy to merge as is but the README could do with an update to remove references to topojson