Ubuntu package "python3" does not include tkinter

[Andrew Berg]

On 2013.04.22 02:17, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> I think that if you are worrying about the overhead of the tkinter 
> bindings for Python, you're guilty of premature optimization. The tkinter 
> package in Python 3.3 is trivially small, under 2 MB.
> 
> Besides, how far do we go? Do we expect people to install (say):
> 
> python3-copy
> 
> so that those who don't need the copy module don't have to install it?
Much of the stdlib doesn't rely on anything but the core interpreter. tkinter by itself is not the issue. As you said, the bindings are
tiny. However, in order to be usable, it requires quite a few things - most notably X. On desktop Linux, this is already installed, but on
server systems, it generally is not (or at least shouldn't be in most cases). Going back to my example of a web server using a Python-based
framework, I'll repeat that there is no reason such a system should have X even installed in order to serve web pages. Even on a lean, mean
server machine, CPython requires only a few extra libraries. Add tkinter, and suddenly you have to install a LOT of things. If you plan to
actually use tkinter, this is fine. If not, you've just added a lot of stuff that you don't need. This adds unnecessary overhead in several
places (like your package system's database).
-- 
CPython 3.3.1 | Windows NT 6.2.9200 / FreeBSD 9.1