GUIs - A Modest Proposal

[Gregory Ewing]

Kevin Walzer wrote:
> PyGUI ... certainly is *not* a lightweight GUI toolkit that could 
> easily be incorporated into the Python core library--it instead has 
> rather complex dependencies on both other GUI toolkits and Python 
> wrappers of those toolkits.

I don't see how the dependencies could be regarded as "complex".
There's more or less only one on each platform, and they're
pretty standard accessories for the platform concerned. You could
say there are two on Linux if you count gtk itself, but you almost
certainly already have it these days if you're running any
kind of desktop at all.

It's true that just having PyGUI itself in the standard library
wouldn't be sufficient, but that's also true of Tkinter today --
you need Tcl/Tk installed in order to use it, and that doesn't
come bundled with Python on all platforms. The same thing
applies to some other stdlib modules, such as sqlite. So just
having a dependency doesn't necessarily preclude a package from
being included in the stdlib.

Having said all that, I would like to eliminate some of the
depedencie. At some point I'll probably re-do the Windows
implementation using ctypes, because pywin32/mfc is hindering
more than helping in some areas. I'm also thinking about ways
to interface directly with Cocoa without going through pyobjc.
But all that is some way off in the future after I get the API
nailed down more.

-- 
Greg