On Thursday 11 May 2006 23:09, Dave Benjamin wrote: > Hey folks, > > Why is PythonWin (win32all) still a separate download from a third party? > Is it legal, technical, or what? I think it's about time it be part of the > standard distribution. > > There are many useful things that you ought to be able to do without > downloading third-party libraries. Terminating a process, for example. > Communicating with other applications via a standard, common protocol > (COM). We demand these things from our UNIX environments--why do we > tolerate their omission on the Windows platform? >
There's a lot of omission on the windows platform, and that ain't python or win32all's fault. > Mac libraries are bundled with Python's *standard library*. I'm not even > advocating merging the win32 extensions with the standard library. All I'm > saying is that when you install Python on Windows, it should ask you if > you want to install PythonWin too, and that this option be selected by > default. > > I write applications that use COM and Tkinter to automate basic office > tasks. My users are thankfully benevolent enough to download and install > Python on their own. They don't know what PythonWin is, they aren't > remembering it, and frankly, I don't think it should be their concern. > Respectfully, that sounds like a reason for *you* to bundle pythonwin (and python, to be honest :) ), not a reason for everyone else to have to download an extra 40-50% of potentially superfluous cruft with their standard python setup. In more general terms I can see why it would be useful to some windows people to have more winapi stuff available. I can still think of quite a few things I'd rather be spending that extra download time on myself, though, like a sexed-up tkinter or maybe even a new gui toolkit. Still, it's not an either/or choice, I suppose. -- There are 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary, and those who don't. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list