Scripting and Gnome and KDE

[Andrew Kuchling]

Moshe Zadka <moshez at math.huji.ac.il> writes:
> Personally I chose Gtk+/GNOME, since (among other things), the Gtk+ type
> system is specifically targetted to support bindings to other languages.

I've played a bit (only a bit, though) with both PyGTk and PyQt.
While I think I marginally prefer PyGTk, because James Henstridge has
done a really nice job of writing the bindings, I use KDE on my
desktop at home and at work, and therefore the PyQt/KDE bindings are
of greater practical interest to me.  They're pretty good, too, though
the extension module is utterly huge, around 4Mb last time I looked.

Every so often I go to some Linux conference and come within the range
of Miguel de Icaza's reality distortion field, and I get all excited
over some new GNOME feature, such as Bonobo's embedding, and try to
compile GNOME when I get home.  Then reality sets in: GNOME uses
patched versions of all sorts of things such as automake, but this is
never clearly documented anywhere.  There's a large pile of libraries,
and it's not clear which ones are needed and which ones are obsolete;
oh, you need imlib, but wait, it's been replaced by gdk-pixbuf, and
esound has been replaced by something else... Usually I never manage
to get a fully working GNOME setup, and the reason for the failure is
usually not apparent.

KDE, on the other hand, is pretty easy to compile, even from the CVS
tree; compile Qt, compile kdesupport and kdelibs, and that's it --
you're all set to compile chosen applications.  Much better
structuring of the development environment -- KDE's setup shares some
of Python's elegance.  (Maybe it's a European thing... :) ) So it's
odd; while I prefer PyGTk, it's tied to a much less well-structured
environment and hence loses out through no fault of its own.

--amk