[Python-Dev] IDLE in the stdlib (original) (raw)

R. David Murray rdmurray at bitdance.com
Wed Mar 20 19:09:41 CET 2013

On Wed, 20 Mar 2013 09:41:53 -0700, Eli Bendersky <eliben at gmail.com> wrote:

Personally, I think that IDLE reflects badly on Python in more ways than one. It's badly maintained, quirky and ugly. It serves a very narrow set of uses, and does it badly.

Being part of Python distributions and being part of core Python standard library are two different things. The former may make sense, the latter IMHO makes no sense whatsoever. Outside the Python core IDLE can be maintained more freely, with less restrictions on contributors and hopefully become a better tool.

On the other hand, after several years of almost complete neglect, we have some people interested in and actively contributing to making it better in the stdib. Terry has proposed a PEP for allowing it to see more rapid changes than a "normal" stdlib package, and I haven't perceived a lot of opposition to this. I think Terry's PEP represents less of change to how we do things than bundling an externally maintained IDLE would be, especially with respect to Linux.

FYI I talked to someone at PyCon who is not a current contributor to IDLE but who is very interested in helping with it, and it sounded like he had the backing of his organization to do this (it was a quick hall conversation and unfortunately I did not get his name). So we may be approaching an inflection point where IDLE will start getting the love that it needs.

That said, there is something important in the argument that more contributors could be attracted to an external project. I'm wondering, however, if this is more a reflection of a general issue we might want to look at, than anything specific to IDLE. Python is a growing project, and it may be time to start thinking about better ways to encourage and coordinate more contributions to various pieces of Python and its standard library. But that is a much bigger conversation.

--David

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