Retiring module. Closes #42, #75, #80, #81, #82, #88.

.gitignore

@@ -95,3 +95,5 @@ ENV/
 .idea/workspace.xml
 .idea/shelf
 .idea/dataSources*
+
+local/

README.rst

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 Django Hashid Field
 ====================
 
+> [!CAUTION]
+> This library has been retired. It is no longer recommended for new projects. Existing projects do not require
+> changes, but should consider migrating to a different library. See the [RETIRED](RETIRED.md) document for more
+> information.
+
 A custom Model Field that uses the `Hashids <http://hashids.org/>`_ `library <https://pypi.python.org/pypi/hashids/>`_
 to obfuscate an IntegerField or AutoField. It can be used in new models or dropped in place of an existing IntegerField,
 explicit AutoField, or an automatically generated AutoField.

RETIRED.md

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+# Django Hashids Field is now retired
+
+I have decided to retire this module. This means:
+
+- I do not recommend using this module.
+- I will *not* be adding any more functionality.
+- I will *not* be addressing any bugs, especially problems interoperating with other modules.
+- I *will* fix any security critical bugs.
+
+## What does this mean for me?
+
+If django-hashids-field works for you in your project, then you don't need to make any changes. I will keep this
+repository and pypi package around indefinitely.
+
+If you are creating a new project, I suggest looking at other solutions, such as django-hashids, django-sqids,
+UUIDs, NanoIDs, or something else.
+
+## Migrating to django-hashids or django-squids
+
+You are free to either remove this module or migrate your project to another library, such as django-hashids or
+django-sqids. Since this library merely "masks" the underlying integer IDs and does not modify the data, then there is
+no process required to migrate data.
+
+The main problem you'll face is that any published links with IDs in them, which is the main reason for a library such
+as this, will no longer work. In those cases you may need to add some code to handle legacy links. If you used prefixes
+then you will probably have to handle them yourself, since django-hashids and django-squids do not support prefixes.
+This means stripping the prefix off of the string, then making the lookup with just the hashids part of the string.
+Conversely, anywhere you generate a link and want a prefixed ID, then you'll need to stick it on manually.
+
+Migrating to django-sqids would be a completely breaking change, since sqids are not compatible with hashids at all. So
+their generated strings would not match.
+
+## Reasoning 
+
+There are many reasons which I feel a duty to explain.
+
+### Hashids itself is retired
+
+A big reason is that the Hashids libraries have been retired, and replaced with Sqids. You can read more on the 
+[squids site](https://sqids.org/faq#why-hashids) about why this was done.
+
+A new library called [django-sqids](https://pypi.org/project/django-sqids/) is available on PyPi. I have not used it
+myself and so can not vouch for it. It's forked from the existing django-hashids library.
+
+### The descriptor causes issues with other libraries
+
+When I first wrote this library, for a project I was working on, it suited my uses perfectly. Still does. However, at
+that time I didn't realize that it was considered bad practice in the Django world to use a descriptor that returns
+an instance of an object, and does fancy stuff when you assign new values. It worked perfectly for me, made some
+debugging and testing more straightforward, and didn't cause me any issues. However, it causes havoc with other
+libraries that are written with the assumption that values of a Model object are basic types, like strings or ints.
+The Hashid object and/or descriptor can be disabled to increase compatibility, but they are enabled by default.
+
+### Replacing the id field causes issues
+
+I designed this library to allow drop-in replacement so there is little or no changes necessary to get the benefit.
+However, this again can cause major issues with other libraries that don't know what to do with a Hashid*Field. I
+provided extra help for Django Rest Framework, for example, but as time has gone on, there have been other libraries
+that are also confused. And since they can't just ignore the primary key field, there can sometimes be no way to get
+them to work with this library.
+
+### I am no longer a primary Django dev
+
+I have moved away from Python and Django for my projects and career. I personally do not like the direction
+that Python and Django are moving in. I think single-threaded async/await patterns are fragile, complicated, and I do
+not like working with them. Also architecting more interactive features using websockets and advanced front-ends are
+more complicated than they need to be. Before I get flamed to death, yes they are possible. I just don't like the
+available solutions.
+
+I found Elixir (the language) and Phoenix (the framework) many years ago, and started playing around and using it for
+all of my personal projects. Even though it is missing some things (though not many) that the Python and Django world
+have, it makes a lot of the hard things trivially easy. It vertically scales with much less friction than the
+equivalent WSGI/ASGI application server, requiring no tuning of processes or threads. It supports websockets easily and
+goes even farther with the magic that is Live View. It also has true preemptive concurrency and parallelism that isn't
+built on fragile callbacks. It's much easier to reason about how things are processed and you never have an issue with
+a function, async or not, stalling or crashing the system. It was built for high available, fault tolerance, and
+both vertical and horizontal scaling in mind.
+
+As a side note, in a recent project I duplicated all the parts of this library I cared about, based on NanoIDs,
+including prefixes, in a custom Ecto.Field that is about 10 lines of code.
+
+## Thank you
+
+I'm sad to see this library retire, but I think it's time. It's been my most successful repo on github, and I thank
+everyone for their support in the form of Issues and PRs. If you have any questions feel free to create a new Issue,
+I will still be monitoring them.