[SciPy-User] Central File Exchange for SciPy

[Gael Varoquaux]

On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 07:00:15PM +0200, Almar Klein wrote:
>    Woaw, I like your enthusiasm! However, let's first establish whether we
>    should discard Pypi or if we can maybe make it suitable for our needs with
>    a few changes (assuming that the rest of the Python community lets us make
>    these changes).

Yes, I am impressed by the positive attitude that this thread is taking.
Congratulations for that, and for offering time and energy.

I think the idea in general is an excellent one. In addition to what has
already been said, here are a few remarks, in random order:

    * Don't disregard PyPI for well-maintained packages: we need the
      non-scientific Python community, let us not break appart from them.
      Besides, scientific users also need packages to read XML, talk over
      the network... On the other hand, for simply cookbook-like stuff,
      I believe that there might be some value in having a scipy-specific
    * repository.

    * Searching is important, but can be made easily using a Google
      custom search. For example, I have been impressed by what Fabian
      did for the scikit-learn's website,
      http://scikit-learn.sourceforge.net/, on the top right of the
      webpage. Try it out, it is cooler than it seems.

    * License: let's at least force users to choose an OSI-compatible 
      license. I would try to push them using the BSD, as in my
      experience many people choose GPL by default, but I would not
      enforce this choice.

    * Self hosting, bandwidth... this should not stop anybody from start
      wild ideas. http://docs.scipy.org started as a crazy idea hosted on
      my girlfriend's server (and coded by Stefan, Pauli and herself :P).
      It migrated to Enthought-hosted servers when it became more
      'production-ready'.

By the way, speaking of migration of service, now that ask.scipy.org is
in production, we should add a link to it on the sidebar of the scipy.org
website, the docs frontpage, and the planet. I can do it for the planet,
so if someone does it for the scipy.org wiki, I'll just copy the design.

In general, I think that it is important that all these websites be
linked together.

As Eleftherios would say 'Go, go team'

Gaël