[Pysdl-devel] Future of pySDL

[David C. <si...@te...>]

Hi. I'm David Clark; I'm listed as dclark under Project Admins on the
sourceforge main page. I was responsible for the documentation on the
pysdl project. I don't know if anyone even reads this list anymore,
but if anyone is out there, I'd like your opinion on the status of
pySDL.

I still get about one e-mail a day asking me how to get pySDL running
under Python 2, or asking about support and updates to pySDL. I
generally refer people to Pete Shinners pygame project
(http://pygame.seul.org), which I describe as a maintained and very
active fork of the pySDL project. The project statistics show that
pySDL still gets around twenty views a day, and around ten downloads a
week, in spite of the fact that it has been abandoned since July 9th.

The problem I see is that people are still referred here by Freshmeat,
Sourceforge's own search engine, the Starship, and by the SDL
homepage. I wonder if having an abandoned project as the only
advertised python wrapper to SDL is turning away people who could
otherwise be writing good code. I was thinking of doing the following:

- Asking Sam Lantinga to change the Python wrapper link at
www.libsdl.org to pygame.seul.org.

- Asking Sourceforge to take down the pysdl project. I have no ability
to do this myself; Mark Baker was the one who created the project and
established sourceforge as its home.

My question is: Does anyone disagree? Is anyone using pySDL in
production work? Would anyone care if it went away, and was officially
replaced by pygame? Am I stepping on any toes here?

I want to be clear: I love the pySDL project. It was the first free
software project I got involved in, and I probably had as much
emotionally invested in it as anyone. There's probably no-one who was
more unhappy to see it descend to its current state than me. I don't
know what caused Mr. Baker to abandon pySDL, and I wish there wasn't a
need for a fork like pygame. I'm just concerned that people will be
confused by the unexplained presence of two projects, one relatively
high-profile but unmaintained, the other very active but unknown.

Opinions? Flames? Anonymous death threats?

-- 
David Clark
si...@te...
Preliminary pySDL Documentation:
http://www3.telus.net/futility/futility/docs/pysdl/index.html