Re: [pygame] Growing Pygame

[Peter Shinners <pete@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2006-07-24 at 22:36 +0800, Simon Wittber wrote:
> Let's build a pygame-contrib package, which is distributed with the
> pygame installers. The package contains contributed tools and
> utilities, which might be candidates for the pygame distribution.

I think there's some good reasons to do this. Arguably there are niche
parts of Pygame that belong more in a package like this. Things like
sysfont and color (maybe even sprites).

The hard part would be whoever is gatekeeper over all this. I don't see
how it can be well managed without some afraid of veto power. 

I also wonder if this should be a collection of "pick and choose" style
modules that a user can just copy into their game code as needed. The
modules would be documented and maintained along with Pygame. But none
of the modules would actually ship with pygame. People would grab what
they want and do a sort of "static" build. This seems like it could work
well, it would also combat the dependency bloat this invites.

I know the Gnome libraries have a similar system with their "egg"
libraries. These are libraries under heavy development. Users grab a
snapshot of the code and compile it statically into their source.
Eventually the egg libraries stabilize and get rolled up.

This style of development would also make it easy to support dropping of
modules that have better alternatives, no longer maintained, etc.