Simple graphic library for beginners

[Paul Moore]

On 11 January 2018 at 18:33, bartc <bc at freeuk.com> wrote:
>> Go. Fetch. Stop fudding.
>
> And you know this link, how? Because googling for 'download pygame', it
> doesn't appear on the first page (or in any of the next half dozen).

Using your search phrase, the first results I get are:

1. Downloads - Pygame
   Page says "Wheel packages are also available on PyPI, and may be
installed by running pip install wheel" right at the top, and that
works perfectly.
2. GettingStarted - pygame wiki
   The "Windows installation" section says quite clearly, "py -m pip
install pygame --user".

I don't know why you'd need to go further, both of those are official
pygame documentation, so it's reasonable to accept them as definitive.
Later hits include some out of date instructions that explain how
you'd have had to install pygame a few years ago, but why are you even
looking that far down the search results? Even Christoph Gohlke's
wheel distribution (which is what Chris was pointing you at) hasn't
been needed for about 12 months. Certainly finding and installing that
needs a bit of work, but it isn't needed any more. Life was harder a
year ago. So what? Be grateful for all the work done by people who
made it better.

Please stop perpetuating the myth that it's hard to install libraries
on Windows. It was in the past, sure. And there's a lot of out of date
information on the web. No-one who works on Python or its packaging
ecosystem can magically remove outdated information from the web. But
we *can* expect people to be careful not to trust out of date
information[1]. And by "out of date", think "over a year old". Pygame
wheels were available on PyPI about a year ago, and the official docs
at packaging.python.org and docs.python.org have been saying "do
python -m pip install XXX" for at least as long.

Nowadays,

    python -m pip install XXX

just works, for 99% of things anyone wants. In particular it works for pygame.

Continuing to complain about a situation that has been resolved for a
year or more is fairly dismissive of the huge amount of work that a
lot of people have put in, free of charge, to improve Python's
packaging ecosystem over the last few years.

Paul

[1] If you were buying a new graphics card for your PC, would you rely
on reviews from 2 years ago? How about a new phone? And software
changes a lot faster than hardware...