WE NEED YOUR HELP!

This is a distributed, volunteer project with many contributors. The best way to join our effort is to browse around, read the last section of this page to learn about our vision and plans, and then announce your intent to help on one of the developer Mailing Lists or contact any of the folks listed on this page.

STEERING COMMITTEE

The purpose of this group is to ensure coherency in the SciPy library and advocate its progression. It organizes doc-days, bug-days, coding sprints, and assists with organizing the SciPy conference. It also serves to resolve questions that come up regarding the future of SciPy.

SOURCE CODE

Make contributions (e.g. code patches), feature requests and file bug reports by submitting a "ticket" on the Trac pages linked below. Because of spam abuse, you must create an account on our Trac in order to submit a ticket, then click on the "New Ticket" tab that only appears when you have logged in. Please give as much information as you can in the ticket. Also specify the component, the version you are referring to and the milestone. Report bugs to the appropriate Trac instance (there is one for NumPy and a different one for SciPy). There are read-only mailing lists for tracking the status of your bug ticket.

Note that NumPy contains the most basic numerical functionality, and SciPy is layered on top of NumPy to provide a much wider range of capability. You need NumPy for SciPy to work.

NumPy

Developer's wiki (Trac)

http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/numpy

Subversion

http://svn.scipy.org/svn/numpy/trunk/

Timeline

http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/numpy/timeline

SciPy

Developer's wiki (Trac)

http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/scipy

Subversion

http://svn.scipy.org/svn/scipy/trunk

Timeline

http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/scipy/timeline

Interested people can get repository write access as well. This usually requires a developer "vouching" for you, which happens more easily if you already made a number of patch contributions.

FILL IN: describe the process of cutting a release (see http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/numpy/wiki/MakingReleases).

Source Code Team

Affiliated, non-field-specific projects:

FILL IN URLs and emails and more projects

PACKAGING

For the majority of users who do not want to build the code from source, binary installers that "just work" are the key to using SciPy. Producing these after the coding is finished is the Packaging Team's job.

FILL IN: Packaging team, please fill in how you make packages, test them, and get them into distribution, and where you need help.

Packaging Team

DOCUMENTATION

Documentation is currently our weakest area, but we are working on it.

We need:

  • Reference pages for the functions, modules, and classes
  • Reference pages for certain concepts, like slicing, broadcasting, etc.
  • A Reference Guide, created in PDF and HTML from the above
  • A Getting Started document (about 10 pages)
  • A book-length User Manual
  • Discipline- and package-specific user manuals
  • More Cookbook recipes

Reference documentation: Each function, module, and class has a "docstring" that is printed when you say help(functionname). It is contained within the actual function/module/class definition, so helping on the docstrings means getting a Trac login (see above). This is the easiest way to contribute documentation, and can be done at a low level of effort. Find a function you like and that you know well. Look at the source code in Trac to ensure you really do know what it does. Write a docstring for it. Enter a Trac ticket for it. There is a docstring standard, which refers to an example and is in the form of a template. If you need help, email the numpy or scipy developer mailing lists and someone will help you out.

We also need a "Getting Started" document that is ~10 pages long and takes a completely new user (no programming experience) through generating some simple array data, doing some math on it, slicing it, plotting a sine wave, defining a one-line function, and reading and writing data from an ASCII text file. Then it should list the general topic areas handled by numpy/scipy, and explain how to get more information and connect to the community. It should not go into detail on anything! It should be readable by an inexperienced user in 20 minutes.

If you are writing a doc, please link it under Projects, and give your contact info as well.

Projects

  • Scipy Cookbook
  • Converting from Numeric: numpy changes some of Numeric's default behaviors. Incompatibilities should be documented here for reference.
  • Using Python for Interactive Data Analysis This is a combination tutorial and quick reference on how to use Python for data manipulation and visualization. Currently it is focused on astronomical analysis, but most of it does not require any special knowledge of astronomy and serves to illustrate the basic principles for most scientific and engineering uses. Written by Perry Greenfield ( perry@stsci.edu ) and Robert Jedrzejewski ( rij@stsci.edu )
  • Numpy Glossary: Definitions of terms. This needs to be filled in and reviewed by experts (correctness) and novices (readability) before moving to the Documentation page.
  • Data sets and examples: Add standard data sets and examples to !SciPy.

Guidelines for Books

Discussion and a straw poll in November 2004 led to the selection of LyX (a GUI for editing LaTeX format) as the preferred tool for book-length SciPy documentation. You can also generate LaTeX files by using converters for other popular file formats, or by editing by hand in a text editor. See Documentation Tools for info and links.

Documentation Team

Many have volunteered, but few have listed themselves here. We need to know what projects we can start and finish this summer. Please list your name and email address under projects of interest. You can spam-obscure the email address if you like.

  • Joe Harrington <jharring@physics.ucf.edu>
  • Reference pages for the functions, modules, and classes - 20 people is not too few here
  • A Getting Started document (about 10 pages) - 1-2 people can do this
    • Stefan van der Walt
  • A book-length user manual - many have tried...hard to do alone, unless we divvy up the chapters?
    • Glen Stark
  • Discipline- and package-specific user manuals
    • Astronomy -- Perry Greenfield and Robert Jedrzejewsky
    • matplotlib -- John Hunter
  • More Cookbook recipes

Technical Reviewers

  • David Shupe shupeNOSPAMatipac.caltech.edu
  • Tim Churches tchurNOSPAMatoptusnet.com.au (scipy.core docs only)

Copy Editors

Please list yourself if you are willing to proofread whatever anyone has written, have prepared manuscripts for publication, AND consider yourself an English grammarian. If you know when to use "which" and when to use "that" when introducing relative clauses, and if "different than" stimulates you like nails on a blackboard, sign up here!

WEB SITE

You are invited to make improvements to any area of this wiki except the front page. Front page changes should be proposed on the scipy-dev@scipy.org mailing list, which is also a good place to post suggestions for other pages.

You will need to make an account on this wiki to edit pages here. Click the login button, above, to do that.

Web Site Team

A page curator's job is to keep a page current, either by direct editing or by recruiting others to help. Curation does NOT mean only the curator or those they contact may edit it!

FILL IN and move above this line in nav order.

The following were listed on the old site. If your name is here, please move it to the appropriate place above this paragraph.

POLISHING SCIPY: THE ACCESSIBLE SCIPY PROJECT (ASP)

ASP is a roadmap for making Python-as-a-tool-for-science usable and friendly ("accessible") to as many people as possible. This page is the open-but-not-in-the-way workplace for the projects that will accomplish that goal. The roadmap identifies three areas of effort: documentation, packaging, and the web site. Discussion of the roadmap, project direction, and specific efforts takes place on scipy-dev@scipy.net . More recently, we discussed a proposal for Wiki workflow that is designed to take advantage of the Wiki Way for developing without having the site look like a perpetual construction zone.

The rest of this page serves as both a place for projects to live before they're ready for prime time and for willing help to meet new projects. If you are currently or potentially working on the non-code aspects of NumPy or SciPy, please enter your name and contact info above so people can find you. If you are interested in extending one of the three main efforts (e.g., writing a new doc, starting a new area of the web site, or taking on package testing for a particular architecture), please describe that new effort above in an appropriate place. Linking your new page or project here will attract the attention of people who are willing to help. Once your project is ready to go public, please ask for a review on the scipy-dev mailing list. When the community is happy, make a link to your page from one of the main pages of the site. After your project is stable and you are no longer seeking additional help, remove the link from this page. Small projects (a screen page or few) can pretty much be posted here, announced, reviewed, and go live in a matter of hours. The goal is to ensure that what is before the public is consistent, complete at some level, well presented, and correct.

Finally, we're all learning on the job here. Some resources (please post more):

Developer Zone (last edited 2008-05-09 01:20:00 by RobertKern)