I'd love to contribute but have some questions

[dolfandringa]

I'd love to contribute to python-mapnik. Mapnik is an awesome renderer, but I think the python bindings can do with some tlc probably.But I have a few questions before I go ham. I have a few ideas/suggestions of what I could do but would love to have your thoughts as well. I'd love to close this ticket and discuss elsewhere if there is a more appropriate place.

1. Is it worth spending time on this. I see there have been no commits for around 2 years or so. I think mapnik is great, and I'd love to help out making docs and updating the python bindings for it, but if the devs think python-mapnik is dead, then I'd rather not waste the time. Personally though, I don't really know of an alternative that is better (not webbased/qgis) for rendering maps.
2. What version should I be working on? I tried to compile mapnik master with python-mapnik master and was running into issues. The 3.1.0 and 3.0.x branches together seems to work though (at least compiles and imports), and I don't see an official release (tag) of mapnik either past v3.1.0. So I'd probably prefer to get some usable results a little bit quicker by making sure python-mapnik v3.0.x is documented and working well enough, and then move over to get master up-to-scratch with mapnik master afterwards.
3. Should I generate at least some api docs with pdoc3. I have run a test and with some fixes to the code, it should work, at least providing more then is available now.
4. There is a lot of old python 2 style syntax still in the code (which has reached eol 2 years ago). Shall I run 2to3 to clean that up, followed by black to clean up the syntax?
5. What do you think about moving the tests away from nose to py.test, since nose has been deprecated for a few years already. Also, a lot of them are currently failing....

Basically, points 1-4 of the above have been done already in this branch (made off v3.0.x): https://github.com/dolfandringa/python-mapnik/tree/feature/add_docs

If you feel any of this is useful, I'd be happy to make a PR. And I can make feature requests/issues for the others too.

[dolfandringa]

Lol, turns out a lot of the failing tests (143 or so) was because I didn't update/init the submodules so the test data was missing. But at least a few are actually failing.

[dolfandringa]

I have switched from pdoc3 to sphinx and hooked it up to readthedocs.io. Currently through my own fork, but I'd gladly change that of course. See https://python-mapnik.readthedocs.io/ for a sample

[mathisloge]

note: i'm not a maintainer of mapnik but contributed in the last time a bit to mapnik itself. So these are my own thoughts and might not reflect what artemp thinks.

1. I think there is a lot of work to do. I've begun porting the build system to cmake in crossplatform build #242 to build python-mapnik with latest master. But it needs some work which I would do after I have contributed the last things for mapnikv4
2. I think latest master is the way to go. Lot has changed since v3
4. Think this would be cool