[Pythoncard-users] thoughts on PIL and external packages

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

The more I look at PIL, the more I think we might want to use PIL as our
native image format and any conversion required by wxPython for displaying
bitmaps on screen would be hidden by our wrapper classes. Has anyone on the
list done a lot of work with either wxPython wxImage/wxBitmap and/or PIL?
The biggest initial complication I can see is that the PIL ImageDraw module
http://www.pythonware.com/library/pil/handbook/imagedraw.htm
appears to be less capable than the wxPython device context drawing
routines, but I haven't actually used them yet, so I could be wrong. Perhaps
it will be enough to simply provide easy translation between formats as I
originally planned and continue to use native wxPython draw methods?!

Part of the reason I'm bringing this up is that PIL is an external package
that we wouldn't distribute with PythonCard, even if it was required. We
might also need NumPy and other packages in the future. We're already
relying on PyCrust.

PyCrust 0.6 was released earlier this week in a variety of formats:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=31263

Given that PyCrust now uses distutils and provides a binary installer for
win32, we should probably not include PyCrust in the PythonCardPrototype
distribution, but simply point people towards the PyCrust distribution.

Any thoughts on this? It will complicate the installation of PythonCard,
which already requires Python 2.1.x and wxPython 2.3.x, but it will make the
PythonCardPrototype distribution more like other Python packages.

Python sure could use a generic Debian-like installer for packages that
pulls down the required packages from the web and handles installation, sort
of a super distutils. I'm now expecting Roman to email and tell me that if I
would have bothered to read the source I would see that this is the -u
option of distutils. ;-)

ka