Hi Holger 2009/11/4 SirVer <sirver@gmx.de>:

Also, while I agree that the plugin architecture is well layed out, I feel that this is not a very pythonic way to do things. In Python, stuff either works because you have everything installed or not. I do not want to criticize before I completely understand the reason for the plugin architecture. Could someone point me to the thread were it was discussed?

I don't think this is an accurate summary of "pythonic". Sometimes, it is impossible not to have differing behaviour depending on the OS, available libraries, etc. In our case, the plugin architecture made it possible for me to display images on my work machine (that only has GTK installed), or on my Mac (which only has Qt4 installed). Another well-known package that uses a similar architecture is matplotlib, with backends for GTK, OSX, PDF and so forth. One aspect of the scikit design that I'd like to preserve is a light list of dependencies. This means that someone who simply wants to run a filter should not have to install OpenCV, Qt, GTK, Cython, etc. Regards Stéfan