[SciPy-user] ANN: SciKits Portal

[David Cournapeau]

Hi Damian,

Damian Eads wrote:
> 1. Are you going to put the source used to generate the general pages
> (e.g. About SciKits) in SVN? This way we can all collectively
> wordsmith so that the text on SciKits web site is the best it can be.
>
> 2. Replace "Scipy" and "scipy" with "SciPy" when referring to the
> SciPy tool suite. Use "scipy" (all lowercase) in a fixed-width font
> when referring to the Python package name "scipy".
>   

I think it would be nice to have this noted somewhere for everything
around scipy, actually.

> 3. I would include a quick, one paragraph blurb on the main page
> describing the purpose of the website. There should be no mention
> about reasons why a package is a SciKit and not part of the main SciPy
> because most users won't care. Here's a rough idea.
>
> "Welcome to the SciKits Repository, a searchable index of optional,
> add-on toolkits (called SciKits) for the SciPy platform. SciKits share
> the common ``scikits`` namespace but are independently managed and
> licensed under terms of the owner's choosing. SciKits cover a broad
> spectrum of application domains including financial computation, audio
> processing, geosciences, computer vision, engineering, machine
> learning, medical computing, bioinformatics. Each SciKit has a detail
> page with a description for it, its licensing terms, installation
> instructions, and documentation."
>   

I think this is a nice description. Maybe mentioning that it is our own
set of toolboxes ala R may be added ?

> 4. Will the front page include a chronologically sorted list of the
> latest releases of SciKits, similar to mloss, freshmeat, PyPi, or
> SourceForge?
>   

One thing we discussed with Stefan was the possibility to add a RSS feed
everytime a new release of any scikits is added; would that fit what you
had in mind ?

> 5. You mention that you have a Google Web App that scans the SciKits
> trunk. Perhaps as SciKits grows, having all the SciKits in one SVN
> repository will become unmanageable? 

I don't think that the trunk is scanned, only pypi is ? I agree one svn
repository is not sustainable if many packages are created (if only from
a purely access rights POV), but I don't think there is any constraint
on that from the webapp POV. But Stéfan and Janto are the ones who did
all the work, they would know better.

Ideally, what would be nice for the developer corner is a build farm
which could generate binary packages automatically; this would not work
for anything complicated, but would be enough for packages without
external dependencies, which is most of the current scikits: most
scipy/numpy developers do not use windows, for example, but a lot
(most?) users do, so a simple windows buildbot to generate binary
installers would be a good plus, I believe. I have some other ideas
about this, and once my Phd candidate duties will be over, I hope to
work on that.

cheers,

David