wxPython / Your Experiences in large project ???

[Vadim Zeitlin]

On 8 Apr 2002 14:43:17 -0500, Chris Spencer <clspence at one.net> wrote:
> Cons:
> 1.  BAD documentation.  They've taken the wxWindows library documentation, added
> a few notes, and called it the wxPython documentation.  And the thing is, they
> haven't kept it updated for more recent releases of wxWindows/wxPython, so
> there's a lot of undocumentated features that just don't show up.

 The problem with having wxPython-only documentation would be an even
increased risk of inconsistencies between wxWindows and wxPython docs. For
example, now when I (C++ developer) add a new wxClass I document it for
wxWindows and the wxPython users get at least some docs as well. If wxPython
docs were separate, do you think I (or anyone else but Robin for that matter)
would update wxPython docs at all? As much as I want to believe in this, I
don't - especially considering that although wxPython is the most successful
set of wxWindows bindings, it's not the only one. There is also wxPerl,
wxBasic, wxLUA and wxEiffel (and probably more) and so having separate
documentation packages for each of them is simply impossible.

 So even though I understand that there is a problem here (especially for
someone who doesn't know C++ at all), I simply don't see any satisfactory
solution to it. All I can say is that we're trying to improve the
documentation constantly and that usually the most effort is spent on this
just before a release so there is some hope that it will get better for 2.4.0
wxWindows release.

> 4.  Did I mention that the documentation is both incomplete and odious?  I
> should not have to constantly do a "find in files" to find out what parameters a
> damned method call takes because the way wxPython implemented a method is
> different than the wxWindows way and someone forgot to make a note of it in the
> rubbish passed off as a "manual".

 :-( Whatever people may think of it you should still realize that it requires
a lot of efforts to produce it. The manual is something that wxPython
programmers could help to improve without problems and I'm very grateful to
all people who send us the patches to it - if each time someone found an error
in the manual he'd sent us a patch, I'm sure the manual would be much better!

> 5.  I've had a REAL problem with conservative "window refreshes", where unless I
> specifically tell each window to repaint itself, I get a lot of scroll bars
> missing, a lot of windows being "grey" (shown without controls), Tab windows
> without the tab headers, etc.

 I don't know which version of wxPython did you use but this looks a lot like
the bug which was there in wxPython 2.3.2.1 and which has been fixed in wxMSW
recently. If it's not this, I'd like to know about the problem in more details
(on wx-users at lists.wxwindows.org a.k.a. comp.soft-sys.wxwindows if possible
please).

 Regards,
VZ
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