Developing, packaging, & promoting a Python open source project - with SOFA Statistics (http://www.sofastatistics.com) as the focus. Cover wxPython, Sourceforge, Freshmeat, Launchpad, Bazaar including Loggerhead.

1. SOFA Paton-Simpson & Associates Ltd Auckland, New Zealand SOFA Statistics Developing, packaging, & promoting a Python open source project Grant Paton-Simpson sofastatistics.com

3. wxPython

4. Launchpad, Freshmeat and Sourceforge

5. Making debian packages

6. Making a Windows installer

8. Open source (AGPL3) – no restrictions on commercial use etc

11. Quick taste of what SOFA is and why they might want it

12. Easy to download

13. SOFA Architecture SQLite MySQL MS Access ... SOFA Linking not importing Scripts ready to glue together etc HTML (spreadsheet- friendly)

15. Created an artificial limit of 5000 cells

16. Scales linearly and Python not the bottleneck

18. Looking at Statlib for basic statistical tests

19. Want to choose a library for charting

20. Want to add own interactive visualisations for explaining t-tests etc

21. Not trying to compete with R (or RK Ward)

22. Focus on making the most common needs easy to satisfy

23. Plugin extensions for rest SOFA Paton-Simpson & Associates Ltd Auckland, New Zealand Next Steps

25. 50% adding GUI

26. Another 50% enabling installation

27. Yet another 50% setting up website, bazaar, Launchpad, Sourceforge, Freshmeat, making screencast for ShowMeDo, writing articles, giving presentations etc

29. Open source is a positive contribution

30. Nice to have a large, long-term project to keep refining SOFA Paton-Simpson & Associates Ltd Auckland, New Zealand Running a Project

32. I benefited from the screencast on debian packaging

33. Great way of coping with bandwidth if your project takes off

34. Video is like screenshots on steroids – gives people a real taste

35. Used gtk-recordmydesktop which is very easy SOFA Paton-Simpson & Associates Ltd Auckland, New Zealand ShowMeDo Videos

38. Mailing list (with Robin Dunn a very regular contributor)

39. Lots of online documentation (but can be a little bit terse)

43. Need to implement methods such as GetNumberCols()

44. With flexibility and power comes some complexity to handle

45. The internal documentation is sometimes longer than the code itself

46. 700 lines to make the data grid you saw in the video (including validation, ability to add new rows and edit values etc)

47. 1/6 were comments SOFA Paton-Simpson & Associates Ltd Auckland, New Zealand wx.Grid

48. Example grid code

49. SOFA Paton-Simpson & Associates Ltd Auckland, New Zealand Custom Controls

51. Getting good documentation takes some resourcefulness – having a good working example the key

52. The custom control is utilised as part of a custom cell editor

53. To make a custom cell editor need to subclass wx.grid.PyGridCellEditor

54. Adequately documented SOFA Paton-Simpson & Associates Ltd Auckland, New Zealand wx.PyControl

56. GetValue() best with unique key (using ORDER BY and LIMIT does not scale)

57. Also need caching

58. Can now scroll large tables with lots of columns e.g. 200,000 records and 20 columns SOFA Paton-Simpson & Associates Ltd Auckland, New Zealand Grid Performance

60. Conditional formatting e.g. all values > 1000 red etc

61. Choice of toolkit very important - can it support what you want to do or will you hit a wall?

62. If I wanted to display sparklines or pie charts as cells in a table … could I? SOFA Paton-Simpson & Associates Ltd Auckland, New Zealand Grid Plans

65. Uses modern distributed version control software (Bazaar)

66. Lots of developer resources and ongoing development

67. Corporate backing – a safe bet SOFA Paton-Simpson & Associates Ltd Auckland, New Zealand Launchpad

69. Built in Python

70. Documentation seemed pitched at my level

72. bzr commit -m “Added ability to import from Excel”

74. Uses modern Ubuntu notifications SOFA Paton-Simpson & Associates Ltd Auckland, New Zealand Bazaar

76. Also written in Python

77. A web viewer for bazaar projects Loggerhead

81. Using AGPL so needed to edit copyright file by hand SOFA Paton-Simpson & Associates Ltd Auckland, New Zealand Making Debian Package (for Ubuntu)

85. distro-specific so may not be a simple matter of using alien to make rpms SOFA Paton-Simpson & Associates Ltd Auckland, New Zealand Making Debian Package cont ...

87. Weird language – cross between PHP and assembler

88. Macros can take parameters but functions cannot

89. No functions inside sections

90. Plenty of documentation etc but best to start and then extend

91. One glitch – was including all files in installer, whether or not used by version (solution – different info has to be in different files which are then included)

92. Issue – file size. Including mysqldb, numpy, wxpython, sqlite, python

93. Put program in Program Files and user files in Documents and Settingssernameofa.. SOFA Paton-Simpson & Associates Ltd Auckland, New Zealand NSIS Windows Installer

95. Lots of new learning

96. Someone has to “take out the trash” (hint – it's you ;-))

97. Phenomenal resources available in open source world

98. Python packaging still a work-in-progress but should shake down SOFA Paton-Simpson & Associates Ltd Auckland, New Zealand Final Thoughts