Upgrade to Vega-Lite 5

How can we prepare Altair and its community to upgrade towards the new release of Vega-Lite 5?

It’s probably wishful thinking that @jakevdp has the time available to do this completely by himself, but it’s probably also wishful thinking that someone can do this completely without the help of Jake.

The skills and knowledge required to change the Vega-Lite schema into workable Python code is quite high. While Altair’s codebase is flexible by nature to accommodate little changes within Vega-Lite, bigger changes such as datum and the recently introduced params, require more changes in the codebase.

Maybe someone is just about to finish all the work required for VL5 or maybe we have to become creative¹.

I’m sure more people have thoughts on this!

Useful references: Interesting comments regarding development in the API of Altair can be found in these issues/PRs: https://github.com/altair-viz/altair/issues/2148, https://github.com/altair-viz/altair/issues/1567, https://github.com/altair-viz/altair/pull/1629

And here is the maintenance guide for Altair internals for people that already like to give it a go: https://github.com/altair-viz/altair/blob/master/NOTES_FOR_MAINTAINERS.md

¹ such as:

• asking Jake for a code-explanation tour in a virtual setting so people with an interest in the project have a guideline to succeed in core-work PRs
• set up an Altair sponsor page to establish a fund for paid upgrading

[jbloom]

I was just curious about this upgrade and the general future of altair, as I’ve noticed commits and code updates have slowed a lot over last year or so. I certainly don’t have ability to maintain package myself, but do think it’s an awesome package. However, I’m trying to decide whether to use it for some long-term projects I’m starting, and hence am sort of curious whether it’s likely altair continues to undergo a lot of active development and growth, or if it’s sort of in maintenance mode now?

[domoritz]

Thank you all for kicking off this conversation. I would like to offer full support from the Vega-Lite team to answer any questions you will run into.