There are some issues with this, which would need to be resolved if we were to do it:
- First off, we need to determine if this is actually allowed under the rules of the program. I know that other organizations, such as the Python Software Foundation, act as umbrella organizations, but there may be some caveats that we should be sure of. - Second, there would obviously need to be full support from the secondary community. - Third, we need mentoring support. I would say that we'd need at least one mentor who is a SymPy developer and one mentor who is a developer of the secondary organization (they may end up benig the same person, if someone works in both places). - Finally, I we would need to decide, as a community, if we want to do it. I personally would want to evaluate this on a per-idea basis, so I can't say if I would support it or not without more specifics. I am not categorically opposed to the idea at any rate. My opinion isn't the end all, though. So let's see how others feel too. - And of course, we would need an actual student who is interested in doing this. One thing to consider here is that in the two years that we are limited in the number of slots that Google gives us. It might be more worthwhile to pursue such an idea as a project under the PSF, who usually gets lots of slots, and uses most of them for umbrella projects. Of course, we could also just ask the students to apply to both, and we could apply the project to whatever organization ends up with the slots (this is how things worked back when SymPy just participated under the umbrella of other organizations; for example, I submitted my proposals to PSF and PSU when I was a student, and I was accepted under whichever organization had the slots for me). I definitely agree that more projects using SymPy as a dependency is a good thing for SymPy. Not only does it indirectly give us more users, but it allows us to see concrete ways that our code is being used (assuming the library is open source), and forces us to make our code more amenable to be used as an API (e.g., make classes friendly to be subclassed, which they currently aren't, see issue 3652). This doesn't just apply to statistics, though that's a great example. Aaron Meurer On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 3:37 PM, Matthew Rocklin <[email protected]> wrote: > I would like to see SymPy be used more heavily in other Python packages. > Many projects need or already have some small algebraic system. I would > like to see SymPy become more of a standard, at least in the scientific > python ecosystem. I think that this could place SymPy in a much more > prominent position and generate a lot of activity within the project. > > GSoC students are a major resource for us. How do people feel about > directing some of this resource towards this issue? Are we willing to > accept project proposals that largely inject SymPy into other prominent > codebases? > > I'm personally familiar with projects in the statistics world, notably > statsmodels and pymc. Each of them has implemented a little language to > define statistical models but neither language handles things like > derivatives or simplification both of which would provide real performance > boosts. I suspect that SymPy could be really useful in the growing python > statistics ecosystem. I also suspect that there are several other > low-hanging fruit out there in other domains. > > However, it is strange that we would support a GSoC student that would not > improve our codebase. How do people feel about this? > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "sympy" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sympy?hl=en. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sympy?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
