[Pythonmac-SIG] FAQ item

[Jack Jansen]

On dinsdag, jul 29, 2003, at 22:08 Europe/Amsterdam, Kevin Altis wrote:
> I realize that the focus will in general be on Cocoa for the UI, but
> whenever possible the underlying mechanisms should probably not be
> Mac-specific unless everyone simply feels like reinventing the wheel 
> and
> doesn't want to leverage the work going on with other platforms.

Definitely true. And actually I think that by writing something in 
Cocoa you have
a *better* chance of creating code portable to other gui-toolkits. 
Because
of the Model-View-Controller paradigm Cocoa pretty much imposes there's 
a good
chance you only have to rewrite the gui-glue.

> This is especially true of the Package Manager, which Python 
> desperately
> needs on all platforms. The PM is related to the larger problem of a
> CPAN-like repository for Python. PyPI starts to solve the directory 
> problem
> and FreePAN might be a mechanism for distribution including mirroring. 
> It is
> nice that the PM is getting so much attention, but it will help the 
> Python
> community as a whole if the underlying mechanisms used can be applied 
> to
> Linux, Windows, etc. later.

Let me get Guido's time machine [...] [POOF!]. What we call PackMan is 
actually
two things: a low-level module pimp.py (currently in Lib/plat-mac) that 
does
all the work, plus a pretty small GUI on top of it, 
Mac/Tools/IDE/PackageManager.py.

There is actually a second top layer already: the main() program inside 
pimp.py
itself. It is a command line tools that should run without any problems 
on
any unix system (although I think it currently still depends on the 
curl unix
tool).

> Neil Hodgson has said that someone is working on a Cocoa port of 
> Scintilla.
> People on this list might want to contact Neil to help push that 
> forward so
> that Scintilla would be available from PyObjC and give editor/IDE 
> authors a
> very fast and capable text editing engine. You can use it via wxPython 
> today
> as the wxStyledTextCtrl, but the library still has some quirks on Mac 
> OS X.
> Anyway, a native port would give you a great deal of capabilities for 
> free
> rather than having to code them up from scratch.

Phew, that would give us three things to choose from: Scintilla, 
PyOXIDE and
whatever Just has been working on (although I'm not sure how fr he is). 
One reason
more to make the new IDE design clean and extensible...
--
- Jack Jansen        <Jack.Jansen at oratrix.com>        
http://www.cwi.nl/~jack -
- If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma 
Goldman -