[PySide] Honkin Idea for PySide's thriving

[todd rme]

On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 12:10 PM, Robert Kern <robert.kern at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2013-03-20 07:41, Christian Tismer wrote:
>> Hey friends, it struck me, and I want to share before it's gone.
>>
>> I am writing this in the spirit of the PyCon US pyside BOF:
>>
>> Besides the technical issues and the things we discussed to create a real
>> PySide community, I would like to add a hew goal.
>>
>> Make PySide the new standard Gui toolkit for Python!
>>
>> I see a lot of my core Python friends sharing my impression that PySide
>> Is a great thing. If we can push it enough, it could even be an officially supported toolkit for python-dev!
>>
>> Either as a replacement or a supported alternative to Tcl/Tk, it could quite rapidly grow a pretty large community!
>>
>> This is a very rough and fresh idea, and I would like to know what would be
>> Stopping us from doing that?
>
> Do you mean putting PySide into the standard library like Tkinter? Legal and
> technical showstoppers aside, I do not think that will work to PySide's benefit.
> PySide needs much more frequent updates than the standard library's development
> cycle permits. Development of a library does not speed up by putting it into the
> standard library. Rather, development slows to a crawl of cautious bugfixes. One
> doesn't get a large community of users by being in the standard library; one
> *might* get into the standard library by already having a large community of
> users. I think PySide will flourish best outside of the standard library.


I would have to agree here.  I think the chances of pyside getting
accepted are essentially zero, and if it was accepted it would slow
the pace of development to a crawl and make it difficult, if not
impossible, to keep up with upstream Qt changes.

I also agree that this probably won't even help us.  How many people
really use the tk GUI backend for python?  Most python GUIs I see
around use PyQt.

So then what can be done to improve pyside's adoption?  You really
need something to make using pyside better for developers than using
pyqt4.

I am more on the science side, but I do a lot of python packaging and
most GUI programs I see rely on pyqwt, either directly or (more often
these days) through guiqwt+guidata, especially for things using plots
and graphs.  This is despite the fact that pyqwt is unmaintained and
will almost certainly never be ported to python3.  This is one key
area where pyqt4 has a major advantage over all other competing python
gui toolkits, including pyside.  I think as long as pyside does not
either have either the same bindings, or at least some sort of good
low-level plotting and data display system, it is going to be hard to
make a compelling case to switch.