I am surprised at your reaction, especially win32sux. I am not insensitive, and mdarby, I am a programmer - a Python programmer. And judging by the code, I believe it was not his first program.

Anyway, is it asking too much to know what the point of the program is, why he wrote it? That would allow a better feedback, and it was my intention.

If everybody posted a program in this way, just code, no explanations, would you still agree?

And is bashing somebody who asks for explanations more sensitive than *kindly* asking for explanation in the first place?

Not to continue this flame fest, but datadriven wrote:

"Hey everybody. I just finished my first parctical program in python. It's similar to swaret or slapt-get, but it only downloads packages, I haven't written the install section yet.

Anyways try it out and let me know what you think."

You have now restated your request for an explanation three times. Is this not explanation enough? I was able to give constructive feedback (both on this forum and via email) regarding potential bugs and possible updates.

The explanation I asked for 3 times now, as you say, is what sets this program apart, in how far it does or *will* differ from existing solutions. Datadriven finally gave me a few answers, after which I stopped asking that question. I don't know why you commented on this afterwards.

I write programs and I publish them on my website. But when I write programs, I try to solve a problem in a new way because I have a need for it. I do not rewrite subsets of programs that already exist unless I ignore those. In which case I am happy if somebody can tell me so.

But maybe that's just me.

I did not flame and I am not going to flame, I leave that up to other people.

Let's leave it there.

In response to uselpa, no this was not my first program. I've been writing PHP full time since '98. But I bought a book on python about 2 weeks ago. This was my first python program. I set out to make something functional and easy to use, because I wasn't satisfied with just another hello world program. It doesn't get much easier than choosing your country and version from a list, and then downloading packages. All I wanted was a little constructive criticism.

I understand that I should not have responded, but I was curious. Part of that curiosity was "what is different, why did he write it?", and I had a lot of work to have an answer ;-)

But I do not mind being root for downloads, and I do not mind config files, so once you were clear about your objectives I knew I was not interested and I quit this thread. Not a big deal, I thought.

Anyway, your Python is good, even if I have no use for the program itself.

Have fun!

For anybody that's interested I wrote a class to access the dialog utility and updated my program to use that class.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/getpkg/