Question regarding choice of python

[Brent Fox]

On Thu, 2004-10-28 at 14:13 -0400, Amitabha Roy wrote:
> I am curious as to why redhat chose python as the language to code
> the user interfaces to many of the system tools. I am assuming
> that system-config-network etc, all were written by redhat people
> and most of them were written in python (with gtk).
> 
> Was there any discussion as to the benefits of python over other alternatives
> (tcl-tk, perl etc) ?  

Sure, there were discussions, but Python was a natural choice for a
number of reasons.  A big one was that anaconda already existed and it
was a Python/GTK program, so there was already a lot of in-house
familiarity with Python and GTK.  We wanted to be able to reuse a lot of
the code between the installer and the configuration tools, so it made
sense to use the same language that the installer was written in.  A lot
of that code got pulled into the rhpl package which both anaconda and
the config tools use.

Another reason is that the PyGtk bindings were of high quality and we
had people in-house who could quickly fix bugs in the bindings when we
hit them (and we did).  


Cheers,
   Brent