[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > If Python doesn't declare an official Gui system, then it'll be > fragmented, inconsistent, and unsupportable.
I don't agree. GUI frameworks are somewhat like Web frameworks, object- relational mappers, and all the other things that work in different ways, work better on various systems, appeal to different tastes and so on. There are a number of cross-platform GUI frameworks which claim some kind of native look and feel on every platform, but declaring one the winner is not going to convince the satisfied users of the others of its superiority. Meanwhile, some people don't care about more than one platform and will quite happily target their chosen platform intentionally, and it's worth remembering that anyone developing for, say, a Free desktop environment will treat such an environment as the means to provide "worthwhile" portability - targeting the Windows API, for example, becomes an irrelevance. There are a few technologies with an "official" GUI framework or APIs, with Java being one of the more notorious at delivering either a fairly weak set of features performing inconsistently across platforms (AWT) or a more ambitious set of features wrapped up in a baroque architecture, performing poorly and still managing to look alien on most platforms (Swing). And before anyone mentions Delphi/Kylix, a recent experience trying out a Kylix-based application on a Red Hat system provided enough of an explanation as to why Borland dropped that particular product. As I've said often enough on the topic of Web frameworks, picking winners gives only a temporary victory to those who want to avoid making decisions. It's better to provide people with a means of making an informed choice, and it should be realised that people will approach this choice from rather different angles. It isn't always going to be, "I want to write a Python application - what GUI should I use?" Instead, it may be, "I want to write a KDE application - can I do so in Python and what are my options?" Pretending that the answer is always the same will frequently drive people to other technologies, not attract them to a technology selling a vision that turns out to be a mirage. Paul -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list