GUIs - A Modest Proposal

[Simon Hibbs]

On 6 June, 23:55, ant <shi... at uklinux.net> wrote:

>If we are to make progress, I can see two obvious approaches:
>1) Improve Tkinter to the point where it is supportable and supported
>by a good fraction of Python programmers
>or
>2) Drop Tkinter as the default and use something else.

IIRC Guido has ruled out officialy adopting a full-bore GUI toolkit
such as WxPython or PyQT, or even a supercharged verison of Tkinter,
into the standard library. There are two main reasons. One is that
doing so would more than double the standard Python distribution's
disk footprint, to no advantage for non-graphical target systems or
developers wanting to use native GUI APIs. Another is that it wouldn't
make any of the other options go away, so e.g. if PyQT were chosen,
anyone wanting to use WxPython would have to install it as well,
creating even more bloat.

GUI toolkits are major projects with their own development cycles and
roadmaps that may not match with that of the standard library. They
are also still rapidly evolving. The standard library should only
contain stable, mature code bases. Furthermore the core Python dev
team have limited resources. Increasing the officialy maintained code
base by 2x or more just isn't supportable.

Tkinter is perfectly adequate for basic GUIs. If you want something
more sophisticated there are plently of high quality, well documented
alternatives to match your platform or functionality requirements.

Simon Hibbs