[SciPy-User] Central File Exchange for Scipy

[Jason Grout]

I've been funded over the summer by an NSF grant to build a library of 
Sage "interacts" (basically small snippets of Sage/Python code). 
Fernando Perez strongly encouraged me at a recent Sage Days to adopt a 
version controlled snippet model (ala Gist).  The other night I threw 
together a very rough proof-of-concept, just-barely-working initial 
start of something along these lines (I hope I put enough disclaimers in 
there!)  My code is here:

https://github.com/jasongrout/snippets

It requires Flask and Mercurial to be installed. Yes, the irony of using 
a Mercurial backend in a project on github is not lost on me.  Though I 
prefer git, the python API to use and create mercurial repositories was 
too nice to turn down in this prototyping stage.  I tried to encapsulate 
the VCS commands in a wrapper class so that the backend could be easily 
switched to git if need be.

This reminded me of the Central File Exchange thread from last November, 
and in particular, several people saying that they were working on a 
version-controlled snippet database [1].  William or Andrew, have you 
posted your work anywhere?  I think we have very similar goals.

I won't be able to work on this heavily for about a month (until after 
the semester), but I will be hitting it pretty hard during the summer. 
The hope is to have a good production version by July.

If anyone else is working on a related project, please let me know, as 
we can probably collaborate.  If anyone wants to fork the github repo 
above and work on it, feel free!

To prevent license discussions from eating up too much energy/time, I 
have decided that the site that I set up will have all snippets be 
(modified) BSD licensed.  That may change, of course, before it's 
actually implemented, but it's not up for debate now.  To encourage 
collaboration you folks, I'm willing to put a BSD license on the 
codebase as well if possible, though the Mercurial docs page seems to 
indicate that I'm forced to use GPLv2 (+?) if I use their API, which I 
am at this point [2].

Thanks,

Jason

[1] http://mail.scipy.org/pipermail/scipy-user/2010-November/027690.html

[2] http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/MercurialApi

--
Jason Grout