Future Development of matplot2tikz

[AlexChrzanowski]

Hey Erwin, this is Alex Chrzanowski, the owner of one of one of the forks of this project.

Since last August, I have been working with a professor and a small team of other students at Purdue University in an attempt to update and fix existing issues in tikzplotlib. Early on, we found your work in this repository and have used it as the foundation for our project. As of now, my fork is 62 commits ahead of your main branch in this repository. These changes are pretty extensive, including changes to nearly all test reference files.

Given the extent of these changes, we wanted to reach out to see if you had a preference for how our development should continue moving forward, given that your work is the foundation for ours.

One option would be to push all of our commits to your repository and continue to do so for each new change or every few changes while still maintaining our own repository. Alternatively, we could continue maintaining our fork independently.

If we pushed our commits to this repository, it would allow for all of the work to remain centralized, but it would take additional time and effort on both sides to communicate each change and go through the process of merge pulls and reference file modifications.

If we were to act independently moving forward, management would be simpler. We would work independently and periodically pull any upstream changes that you may make if needed. It also gives us more flexibility to develop quickly and make decisions on aspects of the project like backwards compatibility.

I, along with the group I work with, have been leaning toward the second option and keeping our repository independent from yours. However, we greatly appreciate the work that you have done on building matplot2tikz and wanted to know if you had a preference.

We would be happy to share details about some of the changes we have made if that would be useful. Thank you again for the work you have done on matplot2tikz, it has been extremely valuable to us.

Best regards,
Alex.