How come wxPython isn't in the standard library?

[Maciej Katafiasz]

On day Sun, 07 Nov 2004 12:07:50 -0800 looked the Lord upon his prophet,
and the prophet was numbered among those called Greg  Steffensen. And thus
spake the prophet:

> wxPython and Tkinter are more portable than PyQT and PyGTK.  Moreover,
> wxPython is not just another toolkit... its a set of bindings to a very
> active toolkit that also has bindings for C++, Java, Javascript, Perl,
> Ruby, Basic, Haskell, .NET and Eiffel, among others.  wxWidgets is
> already something of an open-source standard, independent of Python's
> relationship.  If wxPython were included in the standard library, it
> would become easier for developers to port code from those languages to
> Python.  And because wxWidgets is such a large project, Python would be
> able to benefit from its progress, providing regular language
> improvements with little effort from the Python devs.

That's not really true. wxWidgets is (IMHO) clearly inferior to PyGTK. It
has not as nice API (reminds me of Win32 API, which is disastrous), isn't
in my experience really stable, uses outdated gtk+ 1.2 on my primary
platform, and even gtk+ 1.2 isn't fully used, instead we have some strange
things for any non-trivial (or rather, non-LCD) widget, like treeview or
fileselector. I feel no urge to have yet another "standard" GUI in python
I won't ever use.

> As for the size issue, the fact that including wxPython would triple
> the size of the size of the standard disto says more about the current
> state of the standard distro than it does about wxPython.  If the
> Python devs intend to keep the standard distribution at less than 10 mb
> forever, then I think world-domination is impossible.

That doesn't change the fact that tripling the size is not something you
do everyday. Especially not for (again, IMHO) rather useless component.

> The universal availability of a modern, portable gui toolkit is a
> major feature that languages can provide, and if Python decides to
> reject this, then it will lose popularity to other languages that don't.

This is untrue. Entire notion of "portable toolkit" comes from wrong
assumption there exists anything near portability in GUI. There simply
isn't anything like portable UI, and conversely, creation of any
"portable" toolkit is doomed since day zero.

> Assuming that language penetration is a major motivator for the devs, I
> think that wxPython inclusion really is something that we need to start
> considering.

GUI toolkit isn't something a language should provide. Things that make
sense to be in standard library have to be universally available and
useful. Regular expressions are universally useful, GUI toolkit which is
very platform-specific isn't. So it doesn't make sense to include it in
stdlib. Especially not-so-good toolkits shouldn't be there (and as I said,
I don't consider wxWidgets to be good toolkit)

-- 
"Tautologizm to coś tautologicznego"
Mathrick <mnews2 at wp.pl>