[AstroPy] Coding Guidelines draft (comments encouraged)

[Erik Tollerud]

Hello everyone,

Now that the vision and name for astropy have been ratified, the
Coordinating Committee (Thomas, Perry, and I) have been working on a
draft of coding guidelines/requirements for the astropy package.  The
intent is to use these items to determine if code in affiliated
packages can be merged with the core package (as outlined in the
vision).  I've posted our draft of these guidelines to the wikispaces
page:

http://astropy.wikispaces.com/Astropy+Coding+Guidelines

Feel free to ask questions about or comment on any of these items.  We
want to make sure the community is on board with a common set of
guidelines, so we have tried to take into account discussions that
have already occurred on this list in this draft.  Many of these items
have not yet been discussed,  however, so we will certainly adjust
these guidelines (or add new ones) based on your feedback once
consensus is reached on the list.  We do ask, though, that the
comments/discussion be on the mailing list instead of the wiki page,
so that the archive of the mailing list preserves the full discussion.


Also, note that the guidelines reference both a documentation and
testing guidelines document.  I have created pages for these documents
as well:

Documentation: http://astropy.wikispaces.com/Astropy+Documentation+Guidelines
Testing: http://astropy.wikispaces.com/Astropy+Testing+Guidelines

These documents are not fleshed-out, as we wish to solicit ideas from
the community here.  I will send additional messages to this mailing
list shortly to begin the discussion these topics, and ask again that
the discussion for each take place in their associated threads.


In the near future we (the committee) will also be sending out a
message on determining project hosting and choice of VCS, as well as a
set of priorities to guide development.  Once we  (the community) have
reached consensus on this items, we can begin the actual work in
earnest!

Thanks in advance for your ideas and comments!

-- 
Erik Tollerud