Add How PTable is different from Prettytable to readme

[kxxoling]

Add How PTable is different from Prettytable to readme

[briancline]

My guess is due to PrettyTable not seeing any maintenance for several years (was nearly a year or so when this fork came into existence), and the long list of bugs and feature requests that accumulated over time. PTable seems to provide a backwards-compatible API to the defunct PrettyTable while fixing bugs and adding improvements.

Luke Maurits, the original PrettyTable author, wrote a farewell blog in Jan 2016, handing off the project to the OpenStack folks. However, OpenStack decided not to maintain it and instead rehomed the project under the Jazzband umbrella at @jazzband/prettytable (though they still maintain the PyPI presence).

Despite all this, PrettyTable has had no functional improvements since 2014, so is effectively a defunct project. It's unclear whether any of the Jazzband community, OpenStack, or @flaper87 have any plans for it beyond keeping Luke's original code in the Jazzband repo and a few sdist tarballs out on PyPI.

Sadly, a lot of projects that have used PrettyTable over the years but encountered issues with it probably moved on to other alternatives that are still maintained (like PTable), and I would guess most are unlikely ever to switch back at this point.

[hugovk]

Thanks for the history lesson, good to know!

(Archived version of Luke's farewell blogpost.)

By the way, upstream PrettyTable has been revived and had recent releases this month.

• https://pypi.org/project/prettytable/
• https://github.com/jazzband/prettytable