[Pythonmac-SIG] Mac User Python newbies
Bob Ippolito
bob at redivi.com
Wed Feb 9 06:36:45 CET 2005
On Feb 9, 2005, at 12:07 AM, Roger Binns wrote:
>> This is a very valid point, but since when has that really mattered
>> to people writing open source software? Windows certainly doesn't
>> seem to have more support from the open source community than
>> anything else.
>
> http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/trove_list.php?form_cat=418
Yeah, exactly. There's not even twice as many Windows projects as Mac
OS X projects, and far more Linux projects that Windows projects.
These numbers aren't very good anyway, NetBSD's pkgsrc has over 5300
packages, and there are 204 marked NetBSD on sourceforge!
>> As a counter-point, deploying software on Mac OS X is cheap and fast.
>> You save god knows how much time and money in development and
>> testing (especially testing), so you have much higher profit margins.
>
> It doesn't matter how cheap and fast it is for 5% of the market.
Sure it does, if you release OS X first it can fund Windows development
and testing. Worked fine for us.
> If you look at open source graphical toolkits that support at least
> two platforms, you won't find any that started on the Mac. These
> are the ones I know of that can be used from Python and where they
> started.
>
> - QT (Unix)
> - GTK (Unix)
> - wxWidgets (Windows)
> - Tk (Unix)
> - Fltk (Unix)
> - Fox (Unix)
>
> Consequently the Mac versions of these (if supported at all) is often
> not as good as the original platform. That results in a bit of a
> chicken and egg problem. There is no/little Mac support by other
> developers because the toolkits are poor, and the toolkits don't
> improve because noone uses them.
I think we're probably going to have real GNUStep support for PyObjC
sometime in the next few months.. though I'm not sure whether the NeXT
roots count as Mac or not.
> Fortunately it just takes some sustained efforts, even just bug
> reporting
> and things get better. wxWidgets has gotten a lot better although
> there
> are still holes.
>
> For the OP, one choice is to try and help improve a toolkit at the same
> time as doing their own project. It will end up improving things for
> many more developers and users.
That's definitely an option with any open source dependency :)
-bob
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