Re: [Pythoncard-users] Pythoncard fork: latest post here.

[Andy T. <an...@ha...>]

Mark Carter wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 5:41 PM, Nextime <ne...@ne...> wrote:
>> So, with all my thanks for all original developers of pythoncard
>> for the base code of the new project, i have forked pythoncard.
> 

And good luck to Franco with his new project.

> I love Pythoncard, and as a casual hobby programmer, PythonCard has
> given me an easy to use way make GUIs for my Python programs.  It's
> helped me transition from Visual Basic to Python (moving away from VB,
> by far the biggest obstacle is replacing the superb interface building
> tools).  Looking for a quick and easy way to do a GUI with Python,
> PythonCard came out way ahead of Glade/QT/wxWidgets/etc.
> 
> I do think there is PythonCard development going on, but it's no doubt
> done in whatever spare time the developers have.  However, where I
> think a lot of end users have lost confidence in the project is simply
> that despite whatever development may be happening, there hasn't been
> a history of frequent releases of executable installers.  Rather than
> very infrequent releases with major changes, end users prefer frequent
> releases with incremental improvements.
> 

+1, and a fair call. It has also generally relied on the project 
benevolent dictator being interested and making the changes he wanted to 
make. As I previously stated, if someone wants to step up and provide 
patches or new code for PythonCard we have the ability to let them 
become project developers on SourceForge. Given a sufficient track 
record of contribution it should also be possible to make other people 
project administrators. As a wise man once said - show us the code.

> 
>>  - dropping out codeEditor, resourceEditor,
> 
> Please don't drop codeEditor... I quite liked it as part of the
> package; very useful.
> 
> 
>>  - change resource files to an XML format
> 
> I know that XML is the cool thing these days, but whatever you do,
> please keep the files in a simple enough format that they can be
> hand-edited if necessary.  I liken it to HTML versus CSS... HTML you
> can do by hand, and it's simple.  CSS is so complex that it's barely
> human-readable.  It may be great if you're using expensive proprietary
> software for web development, but it's an example of complexity going
> beyond the bounds of being beneficial, and instead becoming a burden.
> 

+1, we talked about this over the life of the project and could never 
come up with a compelling reason to change the current, simple, resource 
file format to XML. It just introduces another level of complexity for 
no real benefit.


> Beyond that, I haven't had an itch to scratch with programming for a
> while, so I can't comment too much on Pythoncard's current state.
> Although I'll probably be updating my Python install to 2.6 and
> checking that my software still works... I recall that when reading
> that they planned to break compatibility with past code in Python 2.6
> that it sounded like a really boneheaded idea... hopefully I'll find
> that it was only obscure code that was going to become incompatible.
> 

Python 2.6 does not break compatibility with previous versions, Python 
3.0 does, however. As far as reports go there shouldn't (touch wood) be 
any problems running code like PythonCard under Python 2.6

> Mark
> 

Regards,
Andy
-- 
 From the desk of Andrew J Todd esq - http://www.halfcooked.com/