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

Tal Einat taleinat at gmail.com
Mon Jul 12 13:07:05 CEST 2010

On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 1:44 AM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:

FWIW this is why I started IDLE-Spoon (well, continued Noam Raphael's project of the same name, in a sense). The idea was to have a fork of IDLE with new features which need to be tried out by "beta testers" to iron out all of the glitches before making it into the main version, like IDLE-fork back in the beginning of the decade. However I have utterly failed in promoting this project and getting "beta testers" on board, at least partially due to the lack of interest from the community (and admittedly my lack of PR skills). I think such a thing must inherently fail - precisely for these reasons. It's much better to release proposed new features along with Python, and wait for feedback. Users won't start trying things out until after the release. This is a general problem, and lead Barry Warsaw to believe that "release candidates" are an utter waste of time.

That's debatable, and I disagree. IDLE-fork was a great success, for example.

If IDLE actually had many users today, certainly some of them would be interested in trying out a version with usability fixes and improvements. Waiting for a new release of Python can take over a year. Furthermore, backwards compatibility issues and support by third party libraries can delay migration to a newer version of Python even further.

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