[SciPy-user] ANN: SciKits Portal

[Stéfan van der Walt]

Dear SciPy Community

In recent discussions it came to light that SciKits, our equivalent of
toolboxes or packages, fullfil an important role in the SciPy
life-cycle.  First, it is a staging ground for code to be included in
SciPy, where code can mature in view of community feedback.  Second,
it provides a home for packages with licenses or scope different to
that of the main SciPy distribution.

David Cournapeau and myself thought that a SciKits portal, similar in
spirit to the GNU/R Package Repository [1] or the mloss.org site [2],
would be a good way to market SciKits and to promote them for general
use by the community.  The Division of Applied Mathematics at
Stellenbosch University donated some funds, allowing us to hire Janto
Dreijer to bring this idea to fruition.  The resulting
work-in-progress can be found here:

http://scikits.appspot.com

Features include:

- Aggregation of information on SciKits, based on PyPi entries
- Short, permanent URLs to refer to packages, e.g.
http://scikits.appspot.com/example or http://scikits.appspot.com/ann
(the domain should become scikits.scipy.org).
- Automatically generated (and templated) installation instructions
- ReStructuredText rendering of package descriptions as provided by
authors (currently disabled)
- Searchable package listing (weighted algorithm to be implemented)

Please note that the current text snippets are just place-holders, and
that they can be changed by any person with the appropriate
permissions.

We would like to invite the community to give feedback, so that we can
improve the framework further and make a useful contribution.

Thank you for reading, and happy hacking!
Stéfan

[1] http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/
[2] http://mloss.org/software/language/python/