Which GUI?

[Moshe Zadka]

On Fri, 18 Feb 2000 ndev42 at yahoo.com wrote:

> Basically, this is (almost) Tcl/Tk. The only problem I have
> with Tkinter is that it is truly Python/Tkinter/Tcl/Tk, which
> means a whole bunch of software to install before you
> actually can get a single widget on screen. What happened
> to Rivet??

Lost in the disinterest, I presume. At work, we have the standard free
software utilities we install on every new platform which arrives, which
includes bash, Tcl/Tk, gcc, Perl, Python and others. Everything, except
sometimes gcc, takes about half an hour, since we already have the sources
.tar.gz'ed locally. It's so easy, no one has written a script to do so,
we just do it by hand. It is not a "whole bunch" of software before you
can use it. If we were using GNU/Linux, it'd be easier, since most
GNU/Linux distributions come with all of those as packages, and very good
dependency management.

> Talk about portability: it is Ok to say
> that wxPython is portable

No it is not. It doesn't work on AIX. I truly fail to see how come Python,
Tcl/Tk, Perl, bash, GNU grep manage to compile cleanly on AIX, yet
wxWindows doesn't, but until it does, it is not an option for many people,
including me.

> If there is any project of an OO GUI linking Python through
> C-bindings to Motif, X11, Windows and Mac base windowing
> libraries, I'd like to hear about it. This has been done for
> Tk, why not doing it again for Python?

Because it's much easier to steal Tk then reinvent Tk for Python. That's
the good thing about free software: you can build on other people's work
instead of doing it yourself.
--
Moshe Zadka <mzadka at geocities.com>. 
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