Fantomas42/django-blog-zinnia — Issue #121: Zinnia will not run on Jython due to the ImageField on the EntryAbstractClass
Author: jarshwah
Created: 2012-01-03 09:59:53+00:00
State: open

I'm one of the few running Django on Jython rather than Python. As the Python Image Library (PIL) is required for the models.ImageField to be used, Zinnia will not run on a Jython installation. PIL is a C library, and has not been ported to Java to be used with Jython.

There isn't really a good solution that I'd be aware of here. There are work-arounds available (using FileField with additions to settings and extra variables in views), but none are very clean that I can find.

The options that I can come up with are -
1. Bad luck Jython. The field has been there, and is used by X projects. A backward breaking change to support Jython is a bad trade off
2. Remove the field as it isn't really used by many people anyway, and therefore bring support to Jython
3. Implement one of the horrible work-arounds by using a FileField instead.

I think that option 1 will win in nearly any discussion, but I still feel it's necessary to log an issue incase any future Jython programmers come across this application and wish to use it.