Ranting about the state of Python IDEs for Windows

[Alex Martelli]

Carlos Ribeiro <carribeiro at gmail.com> wrote:
   ...
> fault? Probably. But it's all that I have -- a 500MHz PC with 64MB and
> Win98 SE. It has to be Windows, for reasons beyond my control (read
   ...
> PC just can't handle paths with slashes -- I had to pass backslashes
> to all os.* calls. I never had this issue before, so I don't know if
> it's my Windows version or Python's libray fault (I assume the

I wonder if it's connected to using some specific internationalized
version of Win98 SE, because, using US and Italian versions thereof, I
had no problems whatsoever with this issue.  I don't know if you can try
installing a US or other plain vanilla version of Win98 SE to see if
that changes things -- me, I definitely don't have a (?Brazilian? not
sure what you might be using...) version around to try the other way.

> former). I managed to start it yesterday very late at night, but
> haven't tried to use it immediately. I tried it again now, and it's
> bombing as soon as I ask to open a new file. Can I fix it? Probably.
> But that's not the point - I should be delivering code to my
> customers.

Sure, but if Win98 SE _does_ have specific problems with (e.g.) the
Brazilian version, that don't show up in the US, France, Italy, Germany,
and so on -- just a hypothesis, but I can't think of what else it might
be -- how do you expect those problems to be found, much less
worked-around, until and unless somebody using that specific buggy
version tries doing normal things (such as passing / instead of \ as
part of filenames) and they start blowing up?

If you can reproduce specific problems with slashes vs backslashes on
one vs another version of Windows and a good recent Python, opening a
bug report may (if somebody who's doing bug-fixing has the buggy version
of Windows around) produce workarounds for the next release of Python.
You sure can't hope for workarounds or fixes from Microsoft, who does
not even support your version of Windows any more, I believe.


Alex