Time to bundle PythonWin

[Ten]

On Thursday 11 May 2006 23:09, Dave Benjamin wrote:
> Hey folks,
>
> 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.
>
> There are many useful things that you ought to be able to do without
> downloading third-party libraries. Terminating a process, for example.
> 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?
>

There's a lot of omission on the windows platform, and that ain't python or 
win32all's fault.

> Mac libraries are bundled with Python's *standard library*. I'm not even
> advocating merging the win32 extensions with the standard library. All I'm
> saying is that when you install Python on Windows, it should ask you if
> you want to install PythonWin too, and that this option be selected by
> default.
>
> I write applications that use COM and Tkinter to automate basic office
> tasks. My users are thankfully benevolent enough to download and install
> Python on their own. They don't know what PythonWin is, they aren't
> remembering it, and frankly, I don't think it should be their concern.
>

Respectfully, that sounds like a reason for *you* to bundle pythonwin (and 
python, to be honest :) ), not a reason for everyone else to have to download 
an extra 40-50% of potentially superfluous cruft with their standard python 
setup.

In more general terms I can see why it would be useful to some windows people
to have more winapi stuff available. I can still think of quite a few things 
I'd rather be spending that extra download time on myself, though, like a 
sexed-up tkinter or maybe even a new gui toolkit.

Still, it's not an either/or choice, I suppose.

-- 
There are 10 types of people in this world,
those who understand binary, and those who don't.