Jarek Zgoda wrote: > I am not a hacker, just a software developer, but I'd have no problems > in either installing PyGTK on Ubuntu box (sudo apt-get install > python-gtk2, but it's installed by default anyway) or on Windows XP > machine (double click on installer icon). "Simple user" is not an idiot > either and if she can read English, she wouldn't have hard time too. > > The rumours on "problems installing GUI toolkits" are greatly exagerated > IMO.
It might not be a big deal for your own computer, but if you are distributing software professionally to a bunch of customers, things get more complex. Let's say your customers use RHEL4 for instance. If you would like to use a recent PyGTK, this means that the GTK libs in RHEL4 aren't new enough. Upgrading GTK will force you to upgrade a bunch of other libraries as well. That means that the system will no longer be the vanilla RHEL4 with your additions. Bugs might pop up in other applications on the system than yours, because they assumed other versions of shared objects. You can (perhaps) install the newer versions of the libs in non-standard locations and set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to that location for your program, but that means that things brake fairly easy, and if you for instance have a larger system, where Python scripts relying on this new PyGTK are started from a Python interpreter embedded in some big application, this big application will also see the newer versions of all those shared objects that PyGKT pulled in. Unless you are very careful, other programs that you start up from within your application (maybe it's possible to spawn a new shell from your app with the embedded Python interpreter and start arbitrary applications from there) will also get the non-standard shared objects. If you just install the shared objects the new PyGTK rely on in the standard locations, you have probably removed security patches and bug fixes added to the software by Red Hat from the system. Any application might cease to work, and the customer might have problem getting support from Red Hat on the system. You might end up with a lot more support and maintenance work than intended, or get very unhappy customers. Now imagine that you have half a dozen other platforms besides RHEL4 on x86_64 that you need to support... This is a problem you need to deal with if you develop software for Unix. It's not impossible to solve all these problems, but there is certainly a cost in this. If you handle it well, there is a cost in testing and adapting the systems. If you don't handle it well, there might be a big cost in handling emergencies and dealing with unhappy customers or users. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
