[Pythonmac-SIG] FAQ item

[Jack Jansen]

On dinsdag, jul 29, 2003, at 22:05 Europe/Amsterdam, Glenn Andreas 
wrote:

> At 9:41 PM +0200 7/29/03, Jack Jansen wrote:
>> On dinsdag, jul 29, 2003, at 19:18 Europe/Amsterdam, Glenn Andreas 
>> wrote:
>>> PyOXIDE does syntax coloring (and the next version should work 
>>> correcty with 2.3), but it doesn't have the debugger that PythonIDE 
>>> does (yet - it will soon though).  It is, however, making extremely 
>>> good progress (last night I added a simple module help/documentation 
>>> window that uses pydoc) - it is really amazing how powerful Python + 
>>> PyObjC + Cocoa really is.
>>
>> Glenn,
>> there were some questions here about your binary-only release of 
>> PyOXIDE, and
>> I don't recall seeing an answer from you yet on the subject of 
>> PyOXIDE licensing.
>
> The current plan is freeware but the source to the Objective C portion 
> is not available (but all the python portion is).  The problem is that 
> the editor is actually part of my Palm development IDE and so it still 
> pretty well entangled (I plan to clean this up, but partially by bring 
> _more_ of the IDE over, with things such as "projects").

This is going to be a real problem. One of the reasons (AFAIK) that the 
Apple is looking
only at the engine part of MacPython and not the tools is that the 
tools depend on Waste.
And while Waste is available in source form the license is hairy enough 
that they
can't touch it.

And even though for Python itself we're easier with licensing issues (I 
was happy
when I got permission from Marco Piovanelli, the waste author) having 
something essential
depend on something that is neither open source nor vendor supplied is 
going to be a problem.


   All in all, the source editor is still quite a ways off from being a 
simple, stand-alone, drop-in, everything works, sort of thing (for 
example, right now it assumes that every document belongs to a project 
which keeps track of things such as break-points, as well as additional 
symbols to color, completion dictionaries, "find definition" 
double-click pop-ups, headers, etc... only some of which are relevant 
right now to PyOXIDE).

Is the code actually yours, or someone elses? If it is yours: could you 
be tempted
to put it under two licenses? Note that Python is *not* GPL, it is 
BSD-style. So there
are no problems with you distributing a non-open-source version of your 
code in another
product, nor with you moving fixes from the Python community to your 
proprietary
version.

>> Something I want even more (and which is
>> even more work) is a dead simple dialog/window creation tool, similar 
>> to
>> what RealBasic (or, long ago, Hypercard) gives you. It should create 
>> perfectly
>> normal nib files, and perfectly normal PyObjC code, so that it gives 
>> an easy
>> learning curve from beginner to advanced.
>
> The biggest problem I see right there is that there is no documented 
> way to create nib files except to use IB.

I'm pretty sure the NIB files are just serialized objects, dumped with 
the standard
Foundation serializer whose name I always forget.
--
- 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 -