I saw a reference to FileIO.jl in the thread announcing UFFFiles.jl and followed it up out of curiosity.
Is FileIO.jl still in widespread use?
I ask because, according to its registry, it officially supports Excel through ExcelFiles.jl. However, as far as I can tell, ExcelFiles.jl relies in turn on ExcelReaders.jl for reading data from Excel files, and ExcelReaders.jl gave up support of modern (.xlsx) Excel files two years ago.
ExcelFiles.jl reports its status as “active” but its most recent merged PR on GitHub was in 2019 (not counting PRs created by a GitHub “Bot”).
Yesterday, I made a PR on ExcelFiles.jl to restore the Excel functionality it (and FileIO.jl) lost 2 years ago. I’m wondering if that was worthwhile effort or if ExcelFiles.jl has fallen into disuse and should instead be retired?
While maintenance for the backends is spotty, I do use FileIO almost daily.
It’s also tightly integrated into the Makie ecosystem and I expect to rather use it more than less.
To be fair, since my use cases have been working, I’ve been retiring from maintenance, especially for other file formats which I dont use, but others have been taking over.
To be fair, it can take forever to get something merged, since nobody really feels in charge, but maintenance is ongoing
By the nature of it trying to read every file format while spreading the actual work across many packages, its not a surprise that some areas can completely bitrot, while others are driving
I guess it depends on how much the maintainer/community of the actual reader/writer package uses FileIO and maintains it.
@TimG Thank you for asking the question. When I developed UFFFiles, I implemented my own read/write functions, but I find the FileIO approach interesting from a user perspective. That is why I made a PR to add uff format to FileIO. Of course, I think, I can provide the functionality without being officially registered by including in my package the command add_format.
