[SciPy-User] Central File Exchange for Scipy

[Joshua Holbrook]

On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 7:40 PM, Jason Grout
<jason-sage at creativetrax.com> wrote:
>
> 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

This sounds awesome! *watched*

> 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.

I don't think there's anything wrong with using mercurial here. If you
want to support git pulls (though a lot of pythonistas prefer hg it
seems the scientific community's leaning towards git), you could
always make a system to convert repos to git on-the-fly, maybe using
something like http://offbytwo.com/git-hg/ . In fact, I think I would
do something like that as long as it wasn't too slow.

Or, y'know, rewrite the VCS commands. :) Either way.

> 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.

Yeah, it sounds like you're doing something really similar, though
with a Sage focus. How well do these Sage interacts things work with
more vanilla python? I for one don't really use Sage, so if it was
ridiculously different I don't know how much utility the SagExchange
would be for me.

> 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.

Word. I approve. I hope good things come of this. I'm mostly working
with javascript these days, but if I have time I might take a look or
two.

--Josh