[maemo-developers] language and library advice, please.

[From: Hendrik Boom]

It looks as if I'm going to embark on the development of a rather 
involved editor for structured text.  It will ideally run both on a 
conventional Debian Linux system and an N800.  The text to be edited may 
be as large as a few megabytes, and may be spread among several files.  
It will be subject to revision control.  Eventually, there may be 
application-specific interactions with the revision control system.

Of course I'd like to prototype it first, in the hope that either (a) the 
prototype will be good enough for now, or (b) it'll tell me that the 
whole design is wrong before I've wasted too much time on it.

It has been suggested that python would be an appropriate language, 
because it's available both on the n800 and Debian, and is probably 
fairly compatible between them.

But I have a few questions:

(a) What library(ies) should I be using for user-interfacing.  Are they 
reasonably compatible between Debian and maemo?

(b) Are there a ready-made text-editing widget I can start with?  The 
complete structured text will contain a lot of reasonably small sub-texts 
that can be edited conventionally, at least in the prototype.  So I'd 
like to prototyoe it with a ready-made editor handling the smaller pieces 
of text (currently the pargest such piece is about 25K) ans saving the 
structural part for the regular UI library.

(c) Any problems you can already see coming, based on experience with 
these tools?  (Here I'm not looking for generic software-engineering 
advice, but I'd like to know if there are any specific gotchas involving 
python or the recommended libraries.  I've been programming for decades, 
but not in python).

(d)  Of course, advice that I should be considering entirely different 
tools and methods is also welcome/

-- hendrik