[SciPy-dev] The future of SciPy and its development infrastructure

[Stéfan van der Walt]

Hi Matthew

2009/2/24 Matthew Brett <matthew.brett at gmail.com>:
> I think Stefan's position is that, as more people start using and
> contributing to Scipy, it's become near impossible to maintain in a
> release-worthy way (Stefan - is that right)?    That if we want to
> keep going without collapsing we need a more formal process.

Exactly.  If we keep introducing new bugs ourselves, there's not
enough time in the world to bring SciPy up to standard.

> I guess the alternative position is that not having a discipline of
> code review, testing and documentation will make it more likely we'll
> have contributors, and the code will get better that way.

That's an interesting position, and one I don't understand entirely.
I think that a clear, structured guideline for contributions would
make SciPy *easier* to collaborate on.  It is much easier to please
someone if you know what they want!

I would have committed many patches in the past if I had had a
guarantee that they were working as advertised.  That guarantee is
provided by tests.

With the nose framework in place, writing tests is so very easy:

def test_myfoo():
    assert 1 == 1

So I hope that everyone would agree that proper testing and
documentation improves life, not only for the user community, but also
for the contributor.

Regards
Stéfan