[Pythonmac-SIG] My stab at a new page

[Bill Janssen]

> It is useless to me.

That's what I mean by parochial.

Bob, I completely understand and sympathize with what you are saying
here.  And for your purposes, these are completely legitimate complaints.

But there are lots of "pure Unix" programs which it works quite well
for.  I do a lot of text processing, web-page re-writing, web
spidering, etc. which works fine with the pre-installed Python.  I do
image0-processing with PIL and PDF generation with ReportLab which
works fine.  And to not support -- even celebrate -- those uses is,
IMO, self-defeating.

> The minimal effort it takes to use a third party installation of  
> Python is well worth it, and it becomes more useful as time goes on.   
> Doubly so now that Leopard is approaching, because users can upgrade  
> without losing all of their Python work to major version upgrade death.

To begin with, I don't see a stability in the current state of
MacPython that gives me confidence in this assurance.  But I agree
that the effort of installation is minimal, and should be encouraged.

Should we officially encourage Apple not to include Python in their
next release?  That would solve lots of these problems, I think.

Bill