On 1/26/11 11:46 AM, Octavian Rasnita wrote:
From: "Robert Kern"<robert.k...@gmail.com>
That's not Terry's point. The reasons he's referring to (and stated previously)
are as follows:
1. The license of wxWidgets and wxPython is not as permissive as Python's. The
Python developers, as a matter of policy, do not want to include code into the
standard library that is less permissive than the current license.
This is the worst and... sorry for the word, but real stupid thing.
I mean, I don't consider a correct thinking to care more about the
permissiveness of a licence which is anyway open source, more than about the
accessibility.
Being able to say that all of a project is available under the substantively the
same license is really important. It's very hard to get people to use your
software if some parts are under one license and other parts are under a
substantively different one. You are free to decide what licenses you want to
distribute software under; the PSF has that freedom as well.
Try to think that for some people Tkinter displays just a black filled rectangle. In that
case would you still think that it is "correct" to keep that kind of GUI
because of some differences between open source licences?
This is a reason for application developers to use wxPython, not for the Python
developers to include wxPython in the standard library. The standard library
neither claims nor aims to do everything. There are many things that Tkinter
cannot do that wxPython can. None of those things are reasons to replace Tkinter
with wxPython in the standard library. Not everything useful has to be in the
standard library. Python has a vibrant ecosystem of third party packages.
wxPython is probably the most widely used GUI toolkit in Python. It has not been
harmed (and I would argue that it has been very much helped) by not being in the
standard library. Nor has it been harmed by the presence of Tkinter in the
standard library. If wxPython had been included in the Python standard library,
it would not have been able to easily follow the advancements of the underlying
wxWidgets toolkit, and it would be a much less strong GUI toolkit.
2. The Python developers require someone to commit to maintaining contributed
code for a number of years. No one has done so. See reason #3.
In that case I understand that there are enough WxPython developers, well
funded, but there is no commitment from them.
Correct, they have not committed to maintaining wxPython as part of the standard
library (although they are committed to maintaining wxPython outside of it).
They have not even suggested that wxPython should be part of the standard library.
From Python's perspective, there are not enough maintainers that can offer that
commitment and yes, this is a real reason why the core Python developers can't
include WxPython.
3. The wxPython developers do not want wxPython in the standard library, not
least because they want to develop and release wxPython at a different pace and
release cycle than the standard library.
From the message of a list member which (but maybe I am wrong) appear to be a
WxPython developer, I suspected that the WxPython developers might not want
their work to be included in the Python distribution.
I am not really sure about this because I haven't seen any message from a
WxPython developer telling that yes, I am a WxPython developer and we don't
want to allow including WxPython in the Python distro, and I almost don't
believe that, but if it is true, I don't know why they didn't said that,
because WxPython is their work and of course that if they don't accept to
maintain a WxPython as apart of Python distribution, then this discussion
doesn't have any meaning.
Robin, if you're still paying attention to this thread, would you mind chiming
in? Robin Dunn is the wxPython project lead.
I have only heard that WxPython will never be included, but without beeing more
clear.
Who knows, maybe some of those who said that are WxPython developers but for me
they are just some names because I don't know them...
The next (or previous) points are not important anymore if the WxPython
developers don't want their work to be included in the Python distribution.
So, is it true? That was the cause for which WxPython can't be promoted by
Python?
There is a large difference between the being "promoted by Python" and being
"included in Python's standard library. The latter is the issue at hand, not the
former. wxPython is already "promoted" by Python's documentation:
http://docs.python.org/library/othergui.html
--
Robert Kern
"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
an underlying truth."
-- Umberto Eco
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
