Mailing List Archive

Why unbundle Tools and Demo?
Several people argue for unbundling Tools/ and Demo/ in 1.6. I'd like to
argue to leave them in. They're not especially big, and IMHO they are
quite valuable, *especially* to the novice user. In fact, I'd like to
argue that Demo/ should be promoted to the same status as Tools/ (by which
I mean included in the Windows binary distribution). Unbundling Tools/
would mean unbundling IDLE, which IMHO would be a big strategic mistake.

However, I wouldn't be against a cleanup of said directories. Some things
should probably be removed (anything which uses stdwin), some of the code
in classes is showing its age (notes about "being upgraded for Python 1.1"
=), etc. That said, the tkinter/ directory is the best place to look for
simple Tkinter code, and should be included, IMHO.

--david
Re: Why unbundle Tools and Demo? [ In reply to ]
> Several people argue for unbundling Tools/ and Demo/ in 1.6. I'd like to
> argue to leave them in. They're not especially big, and IMHO they are
> quite valuable, *especially* to the novice user. In fact, I'd like to
> argue that Demo/ should be promoted to the same status as Tools/ (by which
> I mean included in the Windows binary distribution). Unbundling Tools/
> would mean unbundling IDLE, which IMHO would be a big strategic mistake.
>
> However, I wouldn't be against a cleanup of said directories. Some things
> should probably be removed (anything which uses stdwin), some of the code
> in classes is showing its age (notes about "being upgraded for Python 1.1"
> =), etc. That said, the tkinter/ directory is the best place to look for
> simple Tkinter code, and should be included, IMHO.

Agreed. One simple thing that would help me immensely would be for
someone to go through all the various Demo directories and make an
inventary of what is there and how useful it is, (1) to all Python
users, (2) to Windows users. Then, perhaps someone could write a
simple document making these files (and Tools) more accessible...

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
Re: Why unbundle Tools and Demo? [ In reply to ]
> someone to go through all the various Demo directories and make an
> inventary of what is there and how useful it is, (1) to all Python
> users, (2) to Windows users. Then, perhaps someone could write a
> simple document making these files (and Tools) more accessible...

Ok. I can do that.
Re: Why unbundle Tools and Demo? [ In reply to ]
[me]
> > someone to go through all the various Demo directories and make an
> > inventary of what is there and how useful it is, (1) to all Python
> > users, (2) to Windows users. Then, perhaps someone could write a
> > simple document making these files (and Tools) more accessible...

[Dave]
> Ok. I can do that.

Great! I didn't mean to volunteer you -- but I think you'd do a great
job.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)