[PyQt] Kudos

[Eric Frederich]

Hey Phil,

I recently built some Python bindings (using Cython) for a 3rd party
library that had to be built using Visual Studio 2005.
Its great having these bindings and being able to use Python.
Unfortunately, to install any other Python modules I have to build
them myself as nobody offers versions using Visual Studio.

When I wanted to start using Qt from Python I initially chose PySide
for its more liberal license and because as of their 1.0 release they
had Windows support.
Building it was an absolute pain.  I had to fix some scripts here and
there.  The resulting install didn't even have uic and I was
instructed to copy it from the official binary release of the PySide
Windows installer.  After doing this it wouldn't compile my .ui files
and just error out.
I compiled the .ui files using the PyQt pyuic4 and got PySide to work okay.

Because of all those problems I decided to give PyQt a go on Windows.
Sip installed no problem.
PyQt gave me some trouble using "configure.py" because I had a space
the path of the source directory that I was running configure from.
After moving it to a more boring "C:\PyQt-win-gpl-4.8.3" it installed just fine.
I wound up having a problem with pyuic4 also just like I did with PySide.
I dug into it a bit and it was a case of me not having built the
pyexpat module.  After building it and putting pyexpat.pyd in the DLLs
folder pyuic4 worked just fine.
Makes me wonder if thats what PySide was missing as well.

In any case, for now I'll be using PyQt.
One thing that PySide did nice that PyQt didn't do was get the Qt dll
files copied into the the Python installation so that everything was
self contained.
It would be nice not to have to have end user's of my programs have to
do a full Qt install when they'll only be using it from PyQt.

Anyway, just wanted to say kudos to having a relatively pain free
installation experience on Windows (with Visual Studio 2005 anyway)
compared to the "competition".

Thanks,
~Eric