GUIs - A Modest Proposal

[Stephen Hansen]

On 6/10/10 10:17 PM, ant wrote:
> So would it be so awful to have Tkinter and GUI2 (whatever it is) in
> the stdlib, assuming that both had equivalent functionality? That
> would be the way to give people the choice.

There's some slight precedent, in that the stdlib does offer more then
one "xml" library -- from the suck of minidom, to sax, to elementtree.
Then again they all sort of address slightly different domains of
problems related to xml. Then there's urllib/urllib2 -- but usually, if
one library duplicates the intent of another, they only co-exist until
such time as the old one can Go Away. (Exactly how long that is,
depends: some 'to go away' libraries can survive a very long time due to
major usage).

That said, I'd be worried about--


> But it does imply that GUI2 is not too huge, to prevent excessive
> bloat (is that a tautology?).

When you factor in dependencies, it might be a lot. Then again, it might
not. Not counting dependencies, PyGUI seems reasonably sized -- the
other major GUI's? Way too big.

> Other interesting comments: licencing. Can anyone give a concise
> summary of whether the 'major' GUIs have any insuperable licencing
> problems that would rule them out anyway? Programming is hard enough
> without lawyers.

wxPython (and its dependency, wxWidgets) has a custom license, but its
very Python-like. Meaning, its essentially 'do whatever you want, open,
closed, commercial, charity, whatever'.

QT is LGPL -- and although you can technically include LGPL stuff in
non-[L]GPL libs, I don't think its policy in Python to allow it. It
creates a burden / obligation.

PyQT is GPL, so impossible to include at all. PySide, Nokia's answer to
PyQt not changing their licensing terms when Nokia acquired TrollTech,
is LGPL. Technically possible, but I don't think its allowable.

PyGTK is LGPL. Same issues: and this raises a question with regards to
PyGUI, which uses pygtk on linux to create its UI.

I don't remember what other UI libs are out there.

I might be wrong on the LGPL policy bit. But the only stuff I'm aware of
that Python bundles (i.e., zlib, sqlite) have the permissive 'do
whatever' type of license. I don't believe Python wants to create a
situation where any burden is placed on someone who embeds it.

-- 

   Stephen Hansen
   ... me+list/python (AT) ixokai (DOT) io

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