GUI programming

[Geoff Gerrietts]

Quoting Grant Edwards (grante at visi.com):
> In article <mailman.1017687607.4322.python-list at python.org>, Gustavo Cordova wrote:
> 
> >> [..references to building wxGTK problems..]
> >> All in all, this can be very frustrating to new users.
> > 
> > Extremely.
> > 
> > I gave up after the n-th iteration.
> 
> It took me 5 or 6 tries, but I did get it to build and install.
> One of the things I found odd was that by default it would try
> to build stuff (GL, etc.) for which my system had no support.

I tried to build from source the first time, and had no luck at all. I
had lots of disagreements between versions that didn't make much sense
to me. I ended up installing a version of Mesa which really screwed up
all sorts of other dependencies on my system and still, I got no love.
I would venture that I dropped three to four hours trying to get all
the dependencies and install everything -- much of that effort appears
to have been unnecessary.

After this glaring failure, I installed from RPM, which was pretty
straightforward, and was able to develop in wxWindows with no problem.

Later, I built from CVS. I was able to do it on my stock RH7.2 system
after taking care to configure everything properly, though it took me
a few passes to get the make to go through to the end. Everything
compiled fine, including the GL support for wxGTK. It went smoothly
enough that I was surprised at my earlier failures.

I don't think that installing wxWindows on an RPM-based Linux system
is really terribly difficult, but at the same time, it's a dependency
that I would prefer not to create if I can avoid it.

These days, I develop for pygtk using a 1.5.2 interpreter. It's not
perfect, and the windows portability is a long way from perfect, but
it also doesn't have a dependency-management issue for most of my
audience -- RedHat 6.2+ users almost universally have python 1.5.2 and
pygtk pre-installed, and for most others, it's a very simple addition.

That said, I'm not sure my solution is the best. It just happens to
work for me.

Thanks,
--G.

-- 
Geoff Gerrietts             "People talk fundamentals and superlatives 
<geoff at gerrietts net>     and then make some changes of detail." 
http://www.gerrietts.net                  --Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr