Richard Jones' Log: Brain dump
EuroPython was great. Attended some interesting talks, talked to some interesting people. Inspired by Alan Kay, Guido and Gregor Lingl. Brain juices well and truly swizzled.
At the post-conference sprints, the Cheese Shop got a much-needed facelift. Searching, browsing and the xml-rpc interface got some attention too (thanks Johannes, Felix, Bj�rn, Moshe and Michał for playing.) David Boddie just emailed me his PyQt4-based GUI Cheese Shop explorer. Neat.
I've just noticed Elisa which has a lot of promise - I just hope gstreamer can do DVB time-shifting one day.
For those keeping track, the next PyWeek will be at the end of August. No solid date yet - that will be announced on the announce list and other places. Effbot, this is your early reminder call :)
Hugin does cool things with panoramic photos. I need to learn to drive it better as my very wide panoramas come out all bent.
Pixen is a really well-thought-out pixel art program. I'm hoping Phil takes notice for future development of the editor in PGU.
Finally, we've got around 65 proposals in for OSDC 2006 with about half a dozen more I'm expecting in that didn't make the deadline. Some really interesting Python talks including one on ctypes by Alex. Looks like it'll be a great program!
If you need clarification of the XML-RPC interface, just ask. It's open to feedback from end users :)
I'm worried by all this talk of separate indexes. If they're for closed communities then perhaps I can see a case, but otherwise wouldn't we just be splintering the community and making it harder for people to find packages?
Typo-alert: it's Gregor Lingl not Lindl.
Whoops, thanks!
A standalone server might be useful in "internal" environments, such as on closed networks, but some people might also want to provide indexes for their own software.
Right now, the list of packages in the Python Package Index contain references to software hosted elsewhere. Why not let the people who host the software provide indexes of their own so that they can offer an easily-searchable way for people to see what they have made available?
As long as software in these mini-indexes is put into the main index as well, there's no fragmentation. (I realise it might be asking a bit much of people to add things to more than one index, but I'm sure there are technical ways to help solve that problem.)
I've since added a feature to the browser that lets you see which packages you've marked. I want to try and find a decent backend that helps install and uninstall packages, and I'd like to remove some of the hacks that assume certain things about the XML-RPC server.
It would be cool if the PyPI server and its surrounding infrastructure could be made to be deployed in other environments, then people could distribute packages via their own Package Indexes. I think there's still need for a few more XML-RPC methods: a welcome (or server information) method would be a good start, and one for listing the available classifiers would also be quite useful.