[IPython-dev] Curses Frontend Update

[Wendell Smith]

On 04/24/2010 06:09 AM, Toni Alatalo wrote:
> Fernando Perez kirjoitti:
>    
>>> they do fairly well. the urwid library is quite nice, and although
>>> documentation is not perfect, it is good, and the whole thing provides
>>> far more than curses - curses requires you to manually handle resizing,
>>> for example. The code for the urwid part is therefore far simpler, and
>>>        
>> Still, this is a tough one: I am genuinely worried about depending on
>> a possibly undeveloped project. Have you contacted the urwid devs to
>> find out a little bit about future plans/py3 development ideas?
>>      
> One way to think about it is to compare the efforts of:
>
> a) reimplementing things that urwid does, like handling resizing
> mentioned above etc., in the ipython curses frontend
>
> vs
>
> b) converting urwid to py3k yourself (shouldn't that be relatively easy
> with 2to3 for a small pure py lib?)
>
> I do agree it's a tough one. There is the danger that the person doing
> that ends up being the urwid maintainer in general if other devs are not
> active. That has been happening with my and PythonQt (the qtscript like
> thing for embedded py in qt apps) now, kind of, 'cause am so far the
> only one who has made it to work on Qt 4.6 (with an ugly hack) and
> haven't heard back from questions nor patches etc., that's not fun when
> you have a lot of other things todo .. but another story alltogether.
>
>    
>> Using curses when urwid is around may feel painful, but at this point
>> closing the door on py3k development possibilities sounds a little
>>      
> There are few closed doors with open source :)
>
> I guess depends on how useful Urwid is in general, and whether there are
> other uses and devs who fix etc. it otherwise and are eventually
> switching over to py3k too. So what Fernando suggested about asking
> around seems to be the thing to do indeed.
>
> 2cently yours,
> ~Toni
>    

Yes, I've thought about just trying to convert urwid myself... but I 
think that's a bit much for me. I have very little experience converting 
2to3, and very little with Urwid... and it would be a big time sink. Its 
a nice library... but there's an awful lot of it that I'm not using, and 
trying to convert all of it myself would, I think, be a bigger 
undertaking than its worth.

I did contact them earlier: the response from the main developer was 
something like "porting to python 3 is not currently in our plans, and 
will take a lot of time as there is a lot of str/unicode handling. 
However, someone rumored that there was a python 3 compatible version 
out there, but I haven't seen it." Which was a little weird. Maybe I'll 
ask again.

Thanks for the feedback!

-Wendell