On Mon, 2011-07-25 at 17:06 +0000, Matthew Knepley wrote:

On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 4:56 PM, Sean Farley <[email protected]> wrote: I disagree with this completely. There's a tendency to think of everything python as a package -- this is NOT a package. It has no __init__.py, it has no __all__, it has no submodules, and it doesn't need any of that. It simply does a one-off task -- it's bits of code to be used in a script. Putting this sort of code in site-packages is what makes site-packages the nightmare of ignored dependencies and overlapping versions it is today.

If you want to make it into a package, you're welcome to do so. With that includes registration with the cheeseshop to make sure the namespace is unique, placing the single file within a folder that includes an __init__ (and then likely just gets imported within that __init__), writing a setup.py, etc etc. It's just complete overkill.

Then why put it in bin/python at all? Just drop the .py extension and put it in bin (with a 'correct' [whatever that may be] python hashbang)?

I am for this, although I do not give a crap what the extension is.

Barry didn't want it in bin if it was going to have multiple files. Maybe it should just go in bin/PetscBinaryIO.py and when I get around to adding the "write" functionality it can be included in the same file? It's not really a stand-alone script though, so it shouldn't get the hashbang or lose the extension. But it's not a full-fledged package of libraries either. I don't think it should be anywhere in the default path -- it's the kind of code that you should have to explicitly include (either via sys.path manipulation or via PYTHONPATH) because too many little scripts of utility code makes for a nasty, polluted namespace. There just isn't a good place (that I know of) in the standard file system hierarchy for this kind of stuff. Ethan

Matt

Sean

-- What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead. -- Norbert Wiener

-- ------------------------------------ Ethan Coon Post-Doctoral Researcher Applied Mathematics - T-5 Los Alamos National Laboratory 505-665-8289 http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~ecoon/ ------------------------------------