Scripting and Gnome and KDE

[Boudewijn Rempt]

Andrew Kuchling <akuchlin at mems-exchange.org> wrote:
> Moshe Zadka <moshez at math.huji.ac.il> writes:
>> Personally I chose Gtk+/GNOME, since (among other things), the Gtk+ type
>> system is specifically targetted to support bindings to other languages.

> I've played a bit (only a bit, though) with both PyGTk and PyQt.
> While I think I marginally prefer PyGTk, because James Henstridge has
> done a really nice job of writing the bindings, I use KDE on my
> desktop at home and at work, and therefore the PyQt/KDE bindings are
> of greater practical interest to me.  They're pretty good, too, though
> the extension module is utterly huge, around 4Mb last time I looked.

Depending on whether you also want KDE support, that's a bit better
now. The qt extension library is just 2Mb now. Of course, adding the
various KDE libraries adds a bit of weight, too - but the most
important, kdecore is just 300Kb. The days when doing an import qt
added 12Mb to you program are long gone!

> Every so often I go to some Linux conference and come within the range
> of Miguel de Icaza's reality distortion field, and I get all excited
> over some new GNOME feature, such as Bonobo's embedding, and try to
> compile GNOME when I get home.  Then reality sets in: GNOME uses
> patched versions of all sorts of things such as automake, but this is
> never clearly documented anywhere.  There's a large pile of libraries,
> and it's not clear which ones are needed and which ones are obsolete;
> oh, you need imlib, but wait, it's been replaced by gdk-pixbuf, and
> esound has been replaced by something else... Usually I never manage
> to get a fully working GNOME setup, and the reason for the failure is
> usually not apparent.

Just wait until PyKDE supports dCop and kParts... And for other fun things
I'm going to try and build a Unicode text editor with Python 1.6 and
PyQt 0.11 this week - should be possible, since both support Unicode now.
(That's one thing I thought really impressive in Idle - paste a bit
of unicode in the editor, run it, and it prints the correct Unicode
characters!)

> KDE, on the other hand, is pretty easy to compile, even from the CVS
> tree; compile Qt, compile kdesupport and kdelibs, and that's it --
> you're all set to compile chosen applications.  Much better
> structuring of the development environment -- KDE's setup shares some
> of Python's elegance.  (Maybe it's a European thing... :) ) So it's
> odd; while I prefer PyGTk, it's tied to a much less well-structured
> environment and hence loses out through no fault of its own.

I'd say that the general design of Qt is cleaner, too. At least, I'd
say that if I had spent enough time looking that the gtk design. Qt
_is_ very clean, though.

-- 

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.valdyas.org