[SciPy-dev] RE: CVS Build Instructions

[Fernando Pérez]

On Wed, 20 Feb 2002, Travis N. Vaught wrote:

> This should be fixed in the next generation of the site along with other
> improvements and fixes.  We will hopefully migrate to it later next week.
> BTW if you have any other suggestions about the site, they are welcome.
> Here are some thoughts that are being bandied about:

Great. I'll then wait for the updated site and make updates there. As far as
ideas, you guys seem to be on a good track. I'd simply say, don't try to get
too fancy. As long as the site has the basic functionality and is *easy* for
you guys to administer, that's fine. One requirement is then that users can
do as much as possible without needing administrator intervention, so you
guys don't get unnecessary loaded.

The whole business of wikis has never really convinced me, maybe I'm old
fashioned. A spam-free mailing list with a well-threaded, searchable archive
is one of the most efficient means of asynchronous communication I can think
of.

One small idea: as people start contributing packages of their own in their
personal areas, it would be good to have a central list where all
contributed packages were summarized. It would be a matter of having the
site update the central list every time a file was uploaded, perhaps having
a convention on directories to use for this (so that not *every* file showed
up there). For example, you could set things so that if a user has a
directory called 'pub/' in his home area, anything uploaded into it gets
automatically scanned and referenced in a global page. Each upload should
support a comment field. This would allow, with no manual intervention on
your part, the site to become a library of contributed scientific routines.

Just an idea.

The one area where scipy seems to need help is documentation, though I know
Janko is kicking in. That's always an unglamorous part of things, but
critical for a successful, useful project of this kind. We might want to
kick off a separate thread on that issue, to shake out some ideas and figure
out what kind of help/resources Janko needs.

Ok, I'm rambling off again...

Cheers,

f.