Re: Proposing module: PyGTK

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Mon, 2004-11-01 at 22:48 +0100, Johan Dahlin wrote:
> m> The main point of proposing PyGTK to be included in the developer
> > > platform (or perhaps the desktop if people find it more acceptable) is
> > > simply to allow people to chose another language to develop applications
> > > than C and make it "officially" supported by the community.
> > 
> > Why is it necessary to add this to the developer platform? I see no
> > problem with the Desktop depending on some things in the Bindings
> > platform. And we have already established, on this list, that there is
> > an overwhelming consensus that Desktop modules should be allowed to use
> > pygtk if their maintainers want to.
> 
> Since there are no applications in desktop depending on platform.

No Desktop applications _yet_ depend on the Bindings because 
a) the Bindings release did not exist until recently.
b) the consensus to use python did not exist until recently.

Someone has to be first.
  
>  But as
> both you and Jeff point out it might be better to just put it in the
> desktop platform.

The Bindings release exists so that applications can depend on the APIs
that it offers. I think that we gain nothing if we move a module from
Bindings to Desktop, but I think that it would undermine the Bindings
release set. I am very much against it.

If you insist on having a precendent, then you might consider pygtk to
be like the freedesktop libraries. We don't need them to be in the
Desktop release, because they are already part of an existing
"platform". 

>  That's the main idea anyway, to have the applications
> written in Python while the libraries can still be in C (and have their
> bindings in separate tarball).

Yes, and that's why there's a Bindings release set. In fact, by moving
pygtk from Bindings to Platform, you would no longer be saying that it
is an API-stable platform, because we have always said that the
libraries in Desktop are not API-stable. Libraries should move _into_ a
platform release set, such as Platform or Bindings when they are API-
stable, not in the other direction.

 
-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com