[SciPy-User] Central File Exchange for Scipy

[Robert Kern]

On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 08:46,  <josef.pktd at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 8:37 AM, Pauli Virtanen <pav at iki.fi> wrote:
>> Thu, 21 Apr 2011 03:07:29 -0500, Jason Grout wrote:
>> [clip]
>
>> As you can surmise from the discussion you linked to, there is resistance
>> in adding new community-oriented features to PyPi itself, as some people
>> feel that such features are out-of-scope for it. Doing it externally also
>> makes sense from the usability and branding point of view --- a site
>> called "Python in science" with filtered package selection can be more
>> convincing and convenient to navigate than browsing "Topic :: Scientific/
>> Engineering" on PyPi.
>>
>> The discussion on rating systems there is an useful read --- it's why I
>> left out any star-based rating systems so far. Just adding "I use this"
>> popularity measure probably works around most issues. (The PyPi download
>> data is not a very reliable measure, as many of the bigger packages host
>> their files externally.)
>
> Sorry to add a comment here.
>
> The thread on PyPi rating system was dominated by a few developers of
> big or famous packages. Ratings for Django or numpy or scipy might not
> be useful, but ratings (with required comments) are very useful for
> the huge number of smaller packages and will be for "snippets".
>
> matlab fileexchange is a good example for this.

Actually, there were a number of us who objected to the ratings as
*users* of PyPI. I find them abhorrent and worse than useless. An "I
use this" button works well enough, I think. Comments can be helpful
if done properly (and doing it properly is a *lot* more involved than
most people think). Provide comparison grids like those on Django
Packages to help people compare features of different packages. Make
it trivial to see the code, and most people will be able to come to
their own, much better judgements. Ratings and comments are the best
you can do for catalogs of items that you need to pay for to examine
(e.g. Amazon), but for catalogs of open source software, you can do a
lot better.

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless
enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as
though it had an underlying truth."
  -- Umberto Eco