pygame and python 2.5

[Steve Holden]

mensanator at aol.com wrote:
> On Feb 10, 4:07?pm, "Ben Sizer" <kylo... at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Feb 10, 6:31 am, "mensana... at aol.com" <mensana... at aol.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Feb 9, 11:39?am, "Ben Sizer" <kylo... at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Hopefully in the future, some of those convoluted steps will be fixed,
>>>> but that requires someone putting in the effort to do so. As is often
>>>> the case with Python, and indeed many open source projects, the people
>>>> who are knowledgeable enough to do such things usually don't need to
>>>> do them, as their setup already works just fine.
>>> So you're saying the knowledgeable people's attitude
>>> is "fuck everyone else as lomg as it's not MY problem"?
>>> And you people complain about Microsoft.
>> Am I one of "those people"? You don't exactly make it clear.
> 
> I'm talking about the people who complain about Microsoft
> making the VC6 compiler no longer legally available and
> yet are so irresponsible that they use it for the latest
> release.
> 
I think you'll find those two sets are disjoint.

>> But yes, there is a lot of "well, it works for me" going around. If
>> you do that long enough, people stop complaining, so people wrongly
>> assume there's no longer a problem. This is partly why Python has
>> various warts on Windows and why the standard libraries are oddly
>> biased, why configuring Linux almost always ends up involving hand-
>> editing a .conf file, why the leading cross-platform multimedia
>> library SDL still doesn't do hardware graphics acceleration a decade
>> after such hardware became mainstream, and so on.
>>
>> However, the difference between the open-source people and Microsoft
>> is the the open-source people aren't being paid by you for the use of
>> their product, so they're not obligated in any way to help you.
> 
> This argument has become tiresome. The Python community
> wants Python to be a big fish in the big pond. That's why
> they make Windows binaries available.
> 
? I would suggest rather that "the Python community" (by which you 
apparently mean the developers) hope that the fruits of their labours 
will be used by as wide a cross-section of computer users as possible.

The goals of open source projects are not those of commercial product 
developers: I and others wouldn't collectively put in thousands of 
unpaid hours a year to make a commercial product better and protect its 
intellectual property, for example.

>> After all, they have already given freely and generously, and if they choose
>> not to give more on top of that, it's really up to them.
> 
> Right. Get people to commit and then abandon them. Nice.
> 
Anyone who committed to Python did so without being battered by a 
multi-million dollar advertising campaign. The Python Software 
Foundation has only recently dipped its toes in the advocacy waters, 
with results that are still under evaluation. And the use of the 
Microsoft "free" VC6 SDK was never a part of the "official" means of 
producing Python or its extensions, it was a community-developed 
solution to the lack of availability of a free VS-compatible compilation 
system for extension modules.

I agree that there are frustrations involved with maintaining extension 
modules on the Windows platform without having a copy of Visual Studio 
(of the correct version) available. One of the reasons Python still uses 
an outdated version of VS is to avoid forcing people to upgrade. Any 
such decision will have fallout. An update is in the works for those 
using more recent releases, but that won't help users who don't have 
access to Visual Studio.

>> Yes, it's
>> occasionally very frustrating to the rest of us, but that's life.
> 
> As the Kurds are well aware.
> 
I really don't think you help your argument by trying to draw parallels 
between the problems of compiler non-availability and those of a 
population subject to random genocide. Try to keep things in 
perspective, please.

>> The best I feel I can do is raise these things on occasion,
>> on the off-chance that I manage to catch the attention of
>> someone who is
>> altruistic, knowledgeable, and who has some spare time on
>> their hands!
> 
> Someone who, say, solved the memory leak in the GMPY
> divm() function even though he had no way of compiling
> the source code?
> 
> Just think of what such an altruistic, knowedgeable
> person could do if he could use the current VC compiler
> or some other legally available compiler.

Your efforts would probably be far better spent trying to build a 
back-end for mingw or some similar system into Python's development 
system, to allow Python for Windows to be built on a regular rather than 
a one-off basis using a completely open source tool chain.

The fact that the current maintainers of the Windows side of Python 
choose to use a commercial tool to help them isn't something I am going 
to try and second-guess. To do so would be to belittle efforts I would 
have no way of duplicating myself, and I have far too much respect for 
those efforts to do so.

There are published ways to build extension modules for Windows using 
mingw, by the way - have you tried any of them? It's much harder than 
sniping on a newsgroup, but you earn rather more kudos.

regards
  Steve
-- 
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