[Python-3000] What do do about IDLE?

[Ronald Oussoren]

On 11-mei-2006, at 21:06, Jan Claeys wrote:

> Op ma, 08-05-2006 te 11:59 -0400, schreef Fred L. Drake, Jr.:
>> Yes, there is a good reason for Tkinter to be separate.  There's  
>> not a good
>> reason for distutils to be separate.
>
> Why would ordinary end-users of an application written in Python need
> distutils?  They will get their application as a py2exe executable (or
> similar) on Windows, as a distro package on linux and on Mac OS X  
> there
> is py2app IIRC.  And even if they had distutils installed, most of  
> them
> won't know how to use it.

Users of python need distutils at times. Not all python software is  
available as distro packages, including all in-house software.  
Therefore a (large?) fraction of python users actually need  
distutils. I've been bitten several times in the past by a python  
installation that didn't include distutils, but luckily most linux  
distributors seem to have caught onto the fact that removing disutils  
creates more problems than it solves.

For scripting languages like python the distinction between  
development and packages and runtime packages is a lot hazier than it  
is for compiled languages like C (and rightly so, a much larger  
fraction of the computer using population is be able to program in  
python than C).

Ronald