[Pythoncard-users] FW: PythonCard feedback

[Kevin A. <al...@se...>]

-----Original Message-----
From: gu...@cj...
[mailto:gu...@cj...]On Behalf Of Guido van
Rossum
Sent: Friday, August 31, 2001 6:03 AM
To: Kevin Altis
Subject: Re: PythonCard feedback


> http://pythoncard.sourceforge.net/getting_started.html

The Unix instructions are a bit misleading (am I correct that you
don't use Unix much? :-).  Moving the files to "your python21
directory" makes no sense, they should be moved into
<prefix>/lib/python2.1/site-packages/ where <prefix> defaults to
/usr/local (but may be /usr/bin when Python came as part of your Linux
distribution).

I *highly* recommend that for the next release you study distutils and
use it to do the installation -- it takes care of the Unix details
too.

Referring to "double-clicking" samples also reveals your Windows
bias. :-)

Please add more complete descriptions to the list of samples.  (You
can save some space by not pretending to show a directory structure.)
It would be helpful if the .py file to start a sample was always the
same name as the directory name, *or* if it was always the same
(e.g. "start.py" or "main.py").  As it is, you sometimes have a test_
prefix and you sometimes have a shorter name (tictactoe/tic.py).  (I
liked the latter -- though some of the images appeared to leave a
think horizontal black line at the bottom after being erased, possibly
an off-by-one error in your code, possibly in wxPython.)

In the section about command line options, you should probably begin
by mentioning that when you start any of the samples, some standard
command line options are accepted.

(It would be cool if there was a meta-sample that presented a GUI to
run any of the other samples, optionally specifying the command line
options, and with an option to view the source of each sample.  Have
you seen the wxPython demo?  Very slick!)

The worldclock sample is cool; it may be easier to understand if you
dropped the references to JS and history.

The next thing beyond getting started would be a look at a simple
example that shows what each piece of boilerplate does, and how you
can vary them.

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