Re: Tutorial

On Fri, Dec 9, 2016 at 1:01 AM, Arie van Wingerden <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> QUESTION: is Pike self-contained in the sense that all module functionality
> is included (so, no extra installs needed to function)?

On Windows, you get a single .msi file and that contains all of Pike.
On Mac OS, I haven't pinned it down yet, but I *think* that installing
XQuartz followed by Pike will give everything you need. (It has to be
two steps because of XQuartz licensing terms. Thanks Apple.) On Linux,
it depends on your distribution; you can often use your package
manager to get "pike8.0-full" to get it all.

> Reason is that Python is so difficult to deploy. If I can:
> 1. install Pike for somebody
> 2. hand them a Pike script
> and then the script runs right out of the box, that would be a huge
> improvement over the Python way, where you have to 'pip install' a lot of
> extra stuff in many cases ...!

Agreed. Here's what I have for the installation instructions for my
Pike-implemented MUD client (which uses GTK2):

http://rosuav.github.io/Gypsum/INSTALL

(It actually installs Pike 7.8.866 because it's easier to support the
older Pike than the older GTK, due to the specific needs of Gypsum.)

With Python, I would normally distribute something that either needs
nothing more than the base installation (so it's the same as Pike), or
has a requirements.txt, so you simply run "pip install -r
requirements.txt" to get everything. Pike does also have a package
manager (called monger), but it's used far less than Python's is. For
starters, you actually get a decent GUI toolkit out-of-the-box,
instead of having to choose between Tkinter (which mostly sucks) and
anything else (which you have to get using pip). :)

There's a reason I do all my GUI programming in Pike these days :)

ChrisA