gui toolkits: the real story? (Tkinter, PyGTK, etc.)

[Diez B. Roggisch]

> Maybe a better question is, how has Tk managed to keep beating up the
> newer, more modern, more featureful, better documented toolkits
> encroaching on his territory? What's Tk's secret weapon?

There is no secret weapon. It's a question about dependencies, maintenance,
stability and supported platforms.

Using one of the other Toolkits would mean that an awful lot of libraries
need to be included as well - even nowadays, people complain about the size
of a python distribution. 

Then something in the core libraries has to be actively & reliably
maintained to not endanger the overall release cycles.

Linked to that is the question of stability - not so much as "it doesn't
crash" but more on the lines of "it doesn't move so fast people cry for
newer versions all the time"

And last but not least is Tk available on a wide range of platforms, larger
than more or less every other toolkit. I know of a popular source control
software which vendor chose Tk for the same reason.

Diez