On 07/10/2010 06:05 PM, Tal Einat wrote:
Hello,
I would like to propose removing IDLE from the standard library.
I have been using IDLE since 2002 and have been doing my best to help
maintain and further develop IDLE since 2005.
In recent years IDLE has received negligible interest and attention from
the Python community. During this time IDLE has slowly gone downhill.
The documentation and tutorials grow increasingly out of date.
Cross-platform support has degraded with the increasing popularity of
OSX and 64-bit platforms. Bugs take months, and sometimes more than a
year, to be solved. Features that have since become common-place, such
as having a non-intrusive search box instead of a dialog, are obviously
and painfully lacking, making IDLE feel clumsy and out-dated.
For these reasons, I think it would be fitting to remove IDLE from the
standard library. IDLE is no longer recommended to beginners, IMO
rightfully so, and this was the main reason for its inclusion in the
standard library. Furthermore, if there is little or no interest in
developing and maintaining IDLE, it should be removed to avoid having
buggy and badly supported software in the standard library.
There might be another alternative.
Both idle and pydoc are applications (are there others?) that are in the
standard library. As such, they or parts of them, are possibly importable
to other projects. That restricts changes because a committer needs to
consider the chances that a change may break something else.
I suggest they be moved out of the lib directory, but still be included
with python. (Possibly in the tools directory.) That removes some of the
backward compatibility restrictions or at least makes it clear there isn't
a need for backward compatibility.
Would a change of this sort help make things any easier?
(Note: idle isn't in the lib directory on Ubuntu.)
Ron
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