Tkinter: The good, the bad, and the ugly!

[Corey Richardson]

On 01/18/2011 10:54 PM, Adam Skutt wrote:
> On Jan 18, 9:27 pm, Corey Richardson <kb1... at aim.com> wrote:
>>
>> Why would you add in only a part of wxPython, instead of all of it? Is
>> the work to cut it down really an advantage over the size of the full
>> toolkit? From what I just checked, the source tarball is 40MB. Can that
>> much really be added to the Python stdlib? What other alternatives are
>> there, besides wxPython, that are perhaps a bit smaller.
>>
> The source tarball from the wxPython.org website contains a full
> version of wxWidgets in addition to the actual wxPython
> functionality.  A python distribution would  certainly contain solely
> the latter and require the end user to already have wxWidgets
> installed in a suitable fashion.  The actual full wxPython binding is
> ~100 MiB uncompressed, ~15 MiB compressed BZIP2, but it also includes
> a lot of stuff that could possibly be removed and/or reduced, like
> full documentation, examples, etc.  It can be shrunk even further by
> taking a dependency on swig and regenerating the bindings at compile
> time (they're shipped prebuilt).  At which point, it's pretty damn
> small.  Not as small as all of the Tk functionality, I think, but well
> under 10MiB compressed.
> 
> The problem to me isn't the size (though some might find it
> objectionable), but the system dependencies you have to take:
> wxWidgets requires GTK+ on UNIX, which requires a whole mess of crap
> in term, plus swig, plus whatever else I may or may not be missing.
> I'm also not 100% certain as to whether it's as portable as Tk is
> today.
> 
> At any rate, if the size is an issue, culling widgets is a lot of an
> effort for not much of a gain, especially when you look at the bigger
> picture of, "Every file I have to download to build python from
> scratch"  Minimizing what's in the Python distribution does not change
> the size of the dependency set one bit, and that dwarfs the python
> code in any case.  That is what you want to avoid in my opinion.
> 
> Adam

That is a pretty large dependency to rely on, and it is rather
undesirable IMO.

~Corey