Python - NAWIT / Community

[flebber]

I just wanted to put out a question about IDE's but this is NAWIT -
not another which ide thread.

My question relates to community contribution. My concern arose when
recently installing the pydev.org extensions in Eclipse. Now as far as
my understanding goes the licensing on both is open source GPL.
However Pydev became open source as part of aptana's acquistion, and
for the moment pydev can be installed as part of the Aptana studio 2/3
releases individually as a plugin, but moving on if you vist the
aptana site there is sweet little about python on their site, their
site is dominated by Radrails.

Can't help thinking they open sourced Pydev so they could bench it. So
I started thinking that the only consistent env each python person has
is idle as it ships in the install.

Sometimes we can contribute with money and sometimes with time, if I
was to contribute money to ensure that I and all new coming python
programmers could have a first class development environment to use
what would I donate to? At the moment no particular group seems
applicable.

Is pydev actively being developed and for who? SPE is a great idea but
is Stan still developing? Pyscripter is good but not 64 capable. Plus
none of these projects seem community centric.

Maybe its just my wish, maybe something already exists, but to my mind
why is there not a central python community ide or plugin setup like
pydev or using pydev(since currently it is very good - to me), which I
know or at least could confidently donate time or money to further
python.

This could apply to many python area's does python use easy_install or
pypm, well if you want camelot or zope (unless you have business
edition) its easy_install, but you wont find an ide with built in egg
or pypm support? Why every Ruby ide has gems manager, and for that
fact look at netbeans, the ide is good but support for python is
mentioned on a far flung community page where some developers are
trying to maintain good python support. PS they seem to be doing a
good job, but a review of the mailing list archives shows little
activity.

One could say that activestate puts in good support but then they do
not provide an ide within the means of the average part time person
retailing its main edition at over $300, Pycharm a good ide at $99 but
then where is my money going.

I think a community plugin architecture which contained components
like pydev, pyscripter, eclipse and eggs/pypm packages would give a
place I can contribute time as my skills grow and confidently donate
money knowing I am assisting the development of community tools and
packages we all can use. No need to reinvent the wheel most things
already exist, for example apt-get & rpm style package management time
tested and could be easily used to manage python eggs for example.

Anyway I have had my 2 cents, if someone is contributing more than I
know, and this wasn't intended to dimnish anyone's effort, just
wanting to look to growing and fostering a stronger python community.

Sayth