[Python-Dev] Removing IDLE from the standard library (original) (raw)

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Sun Jul 11 03:33:28 CEST 2010

On 7/10/2010 7:05 PM, Tal Einat wrote:

Hello,

I would like to propose removing IDLE from the standard library.

-1 I use it daily. On Windows, it works better in many ways than the awful interactive command window, which I almost never use. I would rather the latter be replaced.

I have been using IDLE since 2002 and have been doing my best to help maintain and further develop IDLE since 2005.

In recent years IDLE has received negligible interest and attention from the Python community. During this time IDLE has slowly gone downhill.

I would say that it has not gone uphill.

The documentation and tutorials grow increasingly out of date. Cross-platform support has degraded with the increasing popularity of OSX and 64-bit platforms.

Does it not work with the 64bit Windows build?

Bugs take months, and sometimes more than a year, to be solved.

The problem here, it seems to me, is that all issues are autoassigned to an inactive person (KBK) who does not really accept them except once a year or so. I do not know whether all other commiter are unwilling to commit IDLE issues, no matter how obvious and trivial, or if they all think they 'belong' to KBK. If and when I get a development setup, learn how to apply patches, and get commit privileges, I would want to be able to work on IDLE issues.

Features that have since become common-place, such as having a non-intrusive search box instead of a dialog, are obviously and painfully lacking, making IDLE feel clumsy and out-dated.

I do not know what you mean here, so the 'lack' is completely unobvious and non-painful to me. The IDLE search/replace box strikes as being as good as that I have seen with other Windows software.

For these reasons, I think it would be fitting to remove IDLE from the standard library. IDLE is no longer recommended to beginners, IMO rightfully so, and this was the main reason for its inclusion in the standard library.

Is there a superiour replacement that you would recommend to be packaged with the Windows distribution? It would have to have a shell replacement also.

Furthermore, if there is little or no interest in developing and maintaining IDLE, it should be removed to avoid having buggy and badly supported software in the standard library.

For my day to day use of the shell and editor, there are no serious bugs.

-- Terry Jan Reedy

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