[Python-Dev] Breaking up the stdlib (Was: release cadence)

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Jul 6, 2016 at 7:01 PM, Petr Viktorin <encukou at gmail.com> wrote:
> Maybe a good short-term solution would be to make "import tkinter" raise
> ImportError("Run `dnf install tkinter` to install the tkinter module")
> if not found. This would prevent confusion while keeping the status quo.
> I'll look into that.
>

+1. There's precedent for it; Debian does this:

rosuav at sikorsky:~$ python
Python 2.7.11+ (default, Jun  2 2016, 19:34:15)
[GCC 5.3.1 20160528] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import Tkinter
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-tk/Tkinter.py", line 42, in <module>
    raise ImportError, str(msg) + ', please install the python-tk package'
ImportError: No module named _tkinter, please install the python-tk package

ChrisA