[SciPy-User] Central File Exchange for SciPy

[josef.pktd at gmail.com]

On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 8:07 AM, Gael Varoquaux
<gael.varoquaux at normalesup.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 02:02:46PM +0200, Gerrit Holl wrote:
>> >> The Cookbook holds small pieces of code:
>> >> http://www.scipy.org/Cookbook

there is also the python cookbook (the interface looks closer to
stackoverflow now)
http://code.activestate.com/recipes/tags/numeric/

>
>> > Yes, but it wouldn't really work if hundreds (or thousands) of people would
>> > submit pieces of code.
>
>> Why not add it to scipy?
>
> Because code requires maintenance, releases, and quality assurance. If
> thousands of people start pushing code in scipy, they need to help doing
> both of these things.
>
> The goal of a repo with no garanties like Matlab Central is to lower the
> barrier to sharing code, but giving up on any garanties.

The big advantage in my view of the matlab file exchange is the
ability to comment and rate an existing package and fork it if it
looks like it can be improved with attribution link and has inspired
links. And given that it is all (new code) clearly defined as BSD, it
is safe to do so.

This improves the quality control problem for the user quite a bit.

The problem with pypi and "Topical Software", and as seen in the
question on neural networks, is, for example, that dead and active
projects are indistinguishable without finding the source repository
and checking the updates.

Without user contributed commenting it is a lot of work to maintain a
list, see the (non)speed in cleaning up dead links on the Topical
page.

Josef

>
>> Or if it doesn't fit put it somewhere and
>> link it from http://www.scipy.org/Topical_Software
>
> That means buiding software packages, which is also more work than simply
> dumping code on a webpage.
>
> Gaël
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