Time to bundle PythonWin

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Dave Benjamin wrote:
> Why is PythonWin (win32all) still a separate download from a third
> party? Is it legal, technical, or what? I think it's about time it be
> part of the standard distribution.

Both legal and technical. The PythonWin author and maintainer (Mark
Hammond) hasn't contributed this package for inclusion into Python.
Without him explicitly saying that he wants that to happen, and prefers
that over maintaining it outside Python himself, there is no way it
could ever get included. This is a basic rule of politeness in open
source software: don't fork, not even if you are legally allowed to.
[of course, forks happen, typically because people don't consider
 it important enough to be polite to the original author]

Now, if Mark did indeed offer it for inclusion, I would request (and
also work on if I find the time) that the structure of these libraries
is revised. I know that the current structure tries to be "natural"
in some sense, but I find the assignment of API functions to modules
quite arbitrary. I also think that some of the API functions should
be replaced with their *Ex versions that Microsoft added over time.

Coming back to organizational issues: it would surely help if people
would actively contribute to PythonWin. I believe this still is
primarily a one-man show, and that Mark does an excellent job should
not be an excuse for you to not contribute.

> There are many useful things that you ought to be able to do without
> downloading third-party libraries. Terminating a process, for example.

You can use subprocess.TerminateProcess for that (in some limited way).

> Communicating with other applications via a standard, common protocol
> (COM). We demand these things from our UNIX environments--why do we
> tolerate their omission on the Windows platform?

We tolerate them because they aren't omitted. They are readily
available, and we are all lazy enough to never do more than just
post to a newsgroup complaining about it.

> It's time to bundle PythonWin.

So go and work on that.

Regards,
Martin