Python - NAWIT / Community

[Fabio Zadrozny]

> 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.

Just a little fix there, Pydev is open source EPL (not GPL).

Also, yes, there's little content about Pydev in the Aptana homepage,
but it points to the main Pydev homepage (http://pydev.org) which has
the proper content related to Python (and it's currently being
actively developed and also integrated in Aptana Studio 3, which is
where the current efforts are targeted within Aptana now). Sorry if
this causes the (wrong) perception that Pydev doesn't get as much
attention.


> 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.

Sorry, but I don't follow your thoughts here... there are many
consistent environments for python development which are properly
supported (Pydev being only one of them as you can see at
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/81584/what-ide-to-use-for-python ).


> 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.

I'm the current Pydev maintainer (since 2005)... and while I cannot
state that I'll be in that role forever (forever is quite a long
time), I do think it's well maintained and there are occasional
patches from the community that uses it (although I still get to
review all that goes in).

> 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?

I think the issue is that only recently (if you compare with the
others) has easy_install became the de facto standard in python (so,
it'd be more an issue of interest adding such a feature to the ide).

> 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.
>

Well, I can only comment from the Pydev side here, but do you think
it'd be worth reinventing all that's already done in it just for
having it in Python? When I started contributing to Pydev back in 2004
I didn't go that way because Eclipse itself has a huge community
that's already in place and is properly maintained, which takes a lot
of effort, so, I'm not sure it'd be worth reproducing all that just to
have it 100% Python code -- I say 100% because Pydev does have a
number of things that are in Python, such as the debugger and Jython
for the scripting engine, although the major portion is really in
java.

Another important aspect is that it's much better if you can get an
experience that can later be replicated to other languages (which
Eclipse provides).

Cheers,

Fabio