Dabo in 30 seconds?

[Terry Reedy]

"Ed Leafe" <ed at leafe.com> wrote in message 
news:200508010830.27322.ed at leafe.com...
> others have pointed out, you didn't compile the wxWidgets part of your
> wxPython install so as to include the stylized text control (yes, it 
> seems
> silly that you should have to specify that, but that's another thread...)
>
> Should we have defensive code for every possible broken installation?

That is an impossibility.  However, there is a middle path between that and 
no defensive code.  In the present case, you appear to acknowledge a known 
easy way to mis-compile wxWidgets from Dabo's viewpoint.  If there is a 
known easy way to detect that misconfiguration (which I suspect there is), 
and it is known that someone has tripped over that problem (which it now 
is), then a nice error message  like 'Sorry, Dabo need wxWidgets compiled 
with the --include_stylized_text option' would certainly be friendlier than 
a stack trace.

The Python docs, while written fairly carefully, are probably not yet free 
of ambiguities.  So when people report them, clarifications are usually 
added.

> We use
> a lot of the Python standard library modules, many dbapi-compliant 
> modules,
> and, of course, wxPython. If someone mis-installs one of the 
> pre-requisites,
> do you expect Dabo to catch that and present you with a diagnostic 
> message?

In a sense, I expect nothing from giftware.  (And I have learned to expect 
less than I think I have a right to from buyware ... but that another 
story.)  But if I were to make a prereq mistake, I would prefer more help 
to less.

If you were to do this, I would suggest you make an errormsgs module with 
the text of all the messages and which defines a flag use_msgs = True. 
Then you could conditionally print a message after catching ImportError 
while letting developer turn them off, if desired, for apps they plan to 
distribute.

> I'm serious here: I want to know what people consider acceptable for a
> software package that relies on other packages.

To me, acceptability depends on the audience.  Do you want to limit Dabo to 
professional developers comfortable with sometimes cryptic traceback 
messages or do you want to include people using Python as part of other 
activities?

Terry J. Reedy