Tkinter: The good, the bad, and the ugly!

[geremy condra]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 10:22 AM,  <patty at cruzio.com> wrote:
>
> Now I think I understand a little better where you all are coming from --
> I am a Unix person and I guess I expected to have to learn GUI's using
> whatever is provided for me by default. Which isn't a bad thing.   And if
> I had to add additional software - and learn that - so be it.  I am using
> a Windows XP system and a Windows 7 system presently.  Some day I would
> like to switch out the Windows XP for Unix.

Just dual boot, it isn't hard.

> Thanks for the link to the Python page about the various packages, that
> was enlightening.
>
> Who or what group is actually in charge of what libraries (and programming
> commands/methods such as the Python 3.x rewrite of 'print') goes into
> Python?

Python's developers. There isn't really any other formal structure beyond that.

>  Is this huge discussion really a few feature requests for
> additional libraries to be included for Windows programming?

No, it's about other operating systems too, but what it comes down to
is that rantingrick has been on the warpath about tkinter for a while,
and hasn't proposed a particularly viable alternative. The sad thing
is that if he weren't so unhinged his proposal would probably fare
much better- I know I

>  And aren't some of these libraries developed by 3rd parties?

Any library to replace tkinter would come from a third party, yes.

>And how is that handled by the people in charge?

Again, there aren't really people 'in charge' on this. Whoever wanted
to push for this would have to do the legwork to make sure that the
library on offer was good enough to win a lot of support from the
community, was cross-platform, etc. They'd also have to convince
someone with commit privs that it was a great idea, convince the rest
of the dev group not to oppose it. After that would come the difficult
task of slowly phasing tkinter out, which would involve substantial
long-term commitment.

In other words, whoever wants to push for this is in for a hard,
multi-year slog. Nobody has stepped up to the plate to do any real
work towards that goal.

> Do they have to pay to license it or is this all freely contributed software?

I can't imagine non-free code making it in.

Geremy Condra