Python SIG

[David Malcolm]

On Thu, 2010-03-18 at 15:11 +0000, José Matos wrote:
> On Wednesday 17 March 2010 19:36:35 David Malcolm wrote:
> > How about this:
> > "A SIG for people who are interested in Python on Fedora. This includes
> > packaging and optimizing the various Python 2 and Python 3 runtimes
> > (CPython, Jython), packaging libraries and applications, setting and
> > improving standards for packaging them as RPM's and maintaining Python
> > packages for Fedora."
> > (somewhat copied from Ruby)
> 
> I find this a good start (just as you do). :-)

Thanks!

I went ahead and added it to the top of our SIG page here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Python#Python_Special_Interest_Group
with some links, though it's definitely improvable.  

I haven't yet added it to the text of:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:SIGs
since I think the text could be better.

> Just to add to the discussion my main interest in this SIG is on scientific 
> and/or educational python packages.

This gave me an idea: we could list our particular interests on the SIG
page.  I went ahead and put mine there:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Python#Members

Would other people be up for listing their own areas on that page?


AFAIK we don't have any kind of formal membership, and I think that's a
good thing - I "joined" by adding my name to the list of "Members" on
the page, and subscribing to this list (and telling xchat to autologin
to the IRC channel).

So would it be fair to add something like this to the page:
"If you're interested in Python and Fedora, add your name to this list,
join the mailing list/IRC channel, and get involved"


> What we see, in terms of packaging, in projects like sage 
> http://www.sagemath.org/ or in other projects (proprietary) like EPD 
> (Enthought Python distribution) or Python(x,y) is that put everything under 
> the sun on those packages.
> 
> It would be nice to have the free parts in Fedora...
> 
> Such as the above statement is written I see these goals there.

I met one of the Enthought developers at PyCon last month.  I found EPD
extremely interesting, if nothing else, as a listing of high-value
Python packages.  I don't know if we have every package in EPD, but it
might be possible to automate comparing Fedora vs EPD:
http://www.enthought.com/products/epdlibraries.php


IIRC Enthought link EPD's build of NumPy against a non-redistributable
Intel mathematics library, which means it's probably faster than the
default, but I suspect the license of the Intel lib is a blocker for us
doing the same in Fedora :(


Thoughts?
Dave