[SciPy-dev] Package organization

[Robert Kern]

Pearu Peterson wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 13 Oct 2005, Fernando Perez wrote:
> 
>>Robert Kern wrote:
>>
>>>I would like to see scipy's package organization become flatter and more
>>>oriented towards easy, lightweight, modular packaging rather than
>>>subject matter. For example, some people want bindings to SUNDIALS for
>>>ODEs. They could go into scipy.integrate, but that introduces a large,
>>>needless dependency for those who just want to compute integrals. So I
>>>would suggest that SUNDIALS bindings would be in their own
>>>scipy.sundials package.
> 
> This is for what scipy.lib namespace was created, to collect packages 
> containing wrappers to various libraries. So, how
>    scipy.lib.sundials
> sounds for you in addition to
>    scipy.lib.blas
>    scipy.lib.lapack
>    scipy.lib.minpack
>    scipy.lib.fftpack
>    scipy.lib.odepack
>    scipy.lib.quadpack
>    etc etc
> ?
> 
> Among other things this may reduce the time spent on importing large 
> extension modules that users might not use in their programs.

I'm proposing just the opposite. scipy.lib puts a lot of things which
are unrelated together. That makes packaging harder. On top of that,
you're still importing scipy.lib.sundials, scipy.lib.odepack, and
scipy.lib.quadpack from scipy.integrate. That means you can't really
install that functionality separately.

I want the SUNDIALS raw bindings and the Python convenience code that
wraps around the raw bindings to all be in scipy.sundials. That makes
packaging dead simple and understandable. The things that are
functionally, necessarily related to each other are combined in this one
controllable bundle.

Code should be organized to make coding and distribution easier. It's
documentation that should be organized around concepts.

-- 
Robert Kern
rkern at ucsd.edu

"In the fields of hell where the grass grows high
 Are the graves of dreams allowed to die."
  -- Richard Harter