[AstroPy] Proliferating py-astro-libs

[Prasanth]

Hello,

I would like to put forward a suggestion, as briefly mentioned by others
above, that if community participation is to be effective, then a system
like Github would be very useful. I gather that most of today's established
software have historically accepted contributions in the form of patches and
tarballs, but one of the reasons why Git, and perhaps other systems too, was
invented was because at one stage it became too difficult to do
this effectively.

I like Git, and Github, but there are other services such as assembla.com,
which offers both SVN and Git, and bitbucket.org that offers Mercurial. I
think that moving to a distributed version control system such as Git or
Mercurial, and using websites such as Github, will bring down the barrier
for making contributions.

As was mentioned earlier, an email can get ignored, perhaps unintentionally
or perhaps it just doesn't make it to the top of the to-do list of the
concerned person, where as a pull request is there for anyone to see. It can
be useful to other "forks" of the repository even if the main repository
takes a lot of time to respond. Everyone can see the developments taking
place, and can collaborate and contribute to each individual line of
development.

It is of-course hard to decide on which system to use. Python source code
now uses Mercurial, mainly because they needed a system that was robust on
Windows and the majority of developers liked Mercurial. If it is decided
that an open system for accepting contributions is the way to go, then maybe
we can have such a discussion and voting.

No matter what system is used, I strongly feel that we need to use these
tools like the Linux and core Python communities. With these tools if I want
to make a contribution, I can just, as they say at Github, "Go Fork and
Multiply".

Prasanth

On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 11:33 AM, Joe Harrington <jh at physics.ucf.edu> wrote:

> Responding quickly to Perry...
>
> I like the matplotlib approach to the IDL problem: Implement it right
> first.  Then write compatibility wrappers that look like IDL.  These
> keep old code alive without requiring maintenance of two full
> codebases.
>
> I dislike the SAGE approach.  It installs too much, and not enough,
> both at the same time!  Base classes, small and independent packages,
> meta-packages that have dependencies on a selection of real packages
> and thus look like monolithic systems you can easily extend, all done
> at the package-manager level.  Tests.  Docs.  A small start but with a
> big and straightforward design.  This is the way to go.
>
> --jh--
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