"hundreds of megabytes of KDE runtimes" is absolute FUD. libkde4core is 2.5MB on my system here. Even all the KDE libraries that you would need are only going to be in the 10s of MB. Did you actually do a test to see how much you would need?
Yes I did. On my 32-bit Xubuntu machine, I called `sudo apt-get install kdevelop`, and it has informed me that I require 99.0 MB worth of archives, and that it will take up ~330 MB of disk space after everything is installed. For some reason, I recall `apt` telling me I had to download over 100 MB on my 64-bit machine...
Admittedly, a lot of the download size comes from additional dependencies, but still - I don't want to have to install all that when I use an entirely different WM, and there are alternative WM-independent solutions to begin with.
KDevelop is WM-independent -- its dependencies don't include the window manager or shell. This silo thinking has to stop. Basically all the library stacks on Linux have a shell project prominently associated with them (Qt/kdelibs: Plasma, GTK+: Gnome Shell, EFL: Enlightenment, Motif: CDE), so you run out of "WM-independent" apps pretty fast if you make that mistake. And considering Qt even calls into the GTK+ theming system if run in Gnome it strives to be interoperable more than most.
As for alternatives, I'm not aware of a Python IDE with comparable abilities for Linux (Wing probably comes closest, but is proprietary).
What has the potential for greater impact on your productivity - 320 MB of used disk space or a useful IDE?
Maybe the package (Kdevelop or something above it in the dependancy tree) maintainers screwed up. Unfortunately it's not very uncommon to see complete gnome-* download (I have KDE) for a simple application that only requires one library.
