[PyQt] newbie questions...

[Darren Dale]

On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 3:59 PM, Phil Thompson
<phil at riverbankcomputing.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 12 Aug 2008 20:31:37 +0100, Chris Withers <chris at simplistix.co.uk>
> wrote:
>> Phil Thompson wrote:
>>>> That seems weird to put it politely. I would have thought they both had
>>
>>>> the same interfaces?
>>>
>>> It's not a technical limitation. It is to prevent people developing a
>>> commercial product with the GPL version and then switching to the
>>> commercial version at the last minute. The PyQt commercial license has
>> the
>>> same restriction. In reality we would be open to discussion (usually
>>> involving backdating the purchase of the commercial licenses).
>>
>> Heh, I'd *love* to see this one come to court ;-)
>> Seriously, I'm all for licensing that sees companies rewarded for their
>> hard work, but I'd be seriously interested in how this would be argued
>> in court...
>>
>> Thankfully all the stuff I'm developing is open source, so I don't have
>> that problem :-)
>>
>>>> Anyway, some questions:
>>>>
>>>> - where do I get the Qt Designer from?
>>>
>>> It's part of Qt.
>>
>> Is this Qt for Java or Qt for C++? Which one do I install?
>
> Certainly Qt for C++, probably both.
>
>>>> - how come PyQt4 isn't on PyPI? (Nowadays I'm used to just specifying
>>>> packages as egg requirements in a buildout.cfg
>>>> (http://buildout.zope.org/) but I guess I can't do that with PyQt4?)
>>>
>>> PyPI is a PIA to use when you are not using eggs.
>>
>> Okay, let me rephrase: how come PyQt4 isn't available as an egg?
>> (for the record, I hate eggs, but the python community has adopted them,
>> so I'm just attempting to put up and shut up. zc.buildout does offer
>> some analgesic for the agony)
>
> It's never seemed important.

I distribute a GPL package that depends on PyQt4 and PyMca, and the
latter depends on PyQwt. PyQwt has had a hard time keeping abreast of
recent changes in sip/PyQt4. This causes problems for my users when,
for example, ubuntu upgrades their version of sip/PyQt4 and breaks
pyqwt in their own package manager.

It might be useful if packages like sip/PyQt and PyQwt used the
standard python distribution utilities. For example, if distutils were
used to create source distributions and installers that were then
posted at PyPI, it would be possible to use pip/easy_install to
install the whole stack with a single command. The utilities in
Distribute/setuptools/PEP-390 could be used to specify version
requirements. I could specify that my package depends on
>=pyqwt-5.2.0, pyqwt-5.2.0 would specify its own dependencies, and so
on. My understanding is that multiversion support with eggs would help
prevent version incompatibilities, but I don't have practical
experience.

> I'm also not sure that distutils is up to the job of building PyQt.

Yes, that could undermine the whole approach.

Darren