Feedback wanted on programming introduction (Python in Windows)

[Gabriel Genellina]

En Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:49:02 -0300, Alf P. Steinbach <alfps at start.no>  
escribió:

> I suggested ActiveState because I know from earlier that their packages  
> are easy to install and provide documentation in reasonable Windows CHM  
> help file format. I did try the IronPython .NET implementation first  
> :-). But my experience with *nix folks' porting efforts is that they  
> create Windows ports that don't handle spaces in paths, don't even  
> handle backspace in dialogs they present, require undocumented  
> environment variables set up (and explaining such takes a lot of pages &  
> is demotivating), and just generally without any forethought or any  
> reasonable automation, requiring a lot of explanation and hand-holding  
> which would run to many pages, so I didn't even look at the CPython  
> implementation.
>
> Perhaps I should.

Certainly. The ActiveState folks do a great work, but currently most of  
the "features" listed for ActivePython on Windows are standard in the  
python.org distribution. Like .chm help files, all "core extensions"  
(zlib, bz2, sqlite...), all additional documentation (FAQ, What's new,  
PEPs, everything except the "dive into python" book). The biggest thing  
not included in the python.org distribution is the pywin32 package and  
related stuff (like the PythonWin editor).
Maybe in the past the gap between both distributions were larger, but now,  
the official Python build is perfecty suitable for Windows users.

-- 
Gabriel Genellina