[SciPy-dev] Technology Previews and Sphinx Docstring Annotations

[Damian Eads]

Hi there,

After the first release of my clustering library last November, I
suggested it be included in SciPy. Since the code was quite polished
but could use some refinements, it was suggested a scikit be created.
I found the distribution and web infrastructure for scikits somewhat
lacking, and feared it would eliminate my package's chances of gaining
widespread adoption. If one googles "scikit" instead of "scikits", no
matches come up for the SciPy scikit wiki. If one manages to land on
the scikit front page, its messiness and lack of structure is somewhat
discouraging. Code development is a big time investment, and there is
something very emotionally unagreeable about the thought of one's
well-written code collecting dust.

I think if the web site were revamped so it looked less like a wiki
and more professional, you'd get more scikit developers. I envision a
dynamically generated listing of projects complete with a description,
download link, SVN info, and mailing list subscription information.
Scikit third-party package developers can log-in to create new
projects, change their descriptions, or post new releases. By using
dynamically generated content for the front page, a more consistent
look and feel can be achieved. The MLOSS page is a good example of a
project listing infrastructure that looks nice and professional,
http://www.mloss.org/software/.

If the Scikit page was more professional and we had better keyword
placement on search engines, we'd encourage more third-party package
developers to develop using scipy.org resources over Google Code,
Savannah, or Sourceforge.

My two cents,

Damian

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 6:18 AM, David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 11:09 PM, Olivier Grisel
> <olivier.grisel at ensta.org> wrote:
>>
>> Would not it be possible to have 2 types of buildbot tasks:
>>
>> - react on svn checkin to build and launch the tests (for numpy, scipy
>> and each independent scikit)
>> - nightly build and package a windows installer (idem numpy, scipy and
>> each independent scikit ) and then push it to a static webserver
>> somewhere
>>
>> ?
>>
>> Sure that would require some (unbounded) time investment but that is
>> work that is similar to what is already done manually at each release
>> of numpy / scipy and could help streamline the scikits maintenance /
>> qa a lot.
>
> Yes, that's exactly my point: if we don't have CRAN-like system, it
> does not mean we won't have to do its work, only that we will have to
> do it manually instead. And building installers for every scikit is
> actually much easier than building scipy or numpy installers (because
> of the dependency; most scikits do not depend on anything but
> numpy/scipy).
>
> If we could have access to one mac VM and one windows VM, it would
> relatively easy to have a batch job building nightly binaries for
> every scikit (it is mostly a matter of getting numpy and scipy
> installed + a few tools), and then uploading them automatically on
> scipy.org.
>
> David