Well written open source Python apps

[Micah Elliott]

On Oct 13, Ben wrote:
> Could anyone suggest an open source project that has particularly well
> written Python?  I am especially looking for code that people would
> describe as "very Python-ic".  (Not trying to start any kind of war -
> just wanted some good examples of a well written Python app to read.)

The Python Package Index (PyPI, or cheeseshop)
<http://www.python.org/pypi> has pointers to a lot of packages that are
likely mostly pythonic.

I don't know if this is spelled out more precisely somewhere, but here
is my notion of a pythonic distribution:

* Has modules grouped into packages, all are cohesive, loosely
  coupled, and reasonable length

* Largely follows PEP <http://www.python.org/peps/> conventions

* Avoids reinventing any wheels by using as many Python-provided modules
  as possible

* Well documented for users (manpages or other) and developers
  (docstrings), yet self-documenting with minimal inline commenting

* Uses distutils for ease of distribution

* Contains standard informational files such as:
  BUGS.txt  COPYING.txt  FAQ.txt  HISTORY.txt  README.txt  THANKS.txt

* Contains standard directory structure such as:
  doc/  tools/ (or scripts/ or bin/)  packageX/  packageY/  test/

* Clean UI, easy to use, probably relying on optparse or getopt

* Has many unit tests that are trivial to run, and code is structured to
  facilitate building of tests

The first example of a pythonic package that comes to my mind is
docutils <http://docutils.sourceforge.net/>.

-- 
Micah Elliott
<mde at micah.elliott.name>