sofa statistics - developing, packaging, & promoting a python open source project

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

Introducing the SOFA project 3. wxPython 4. Launchpad, Freshmeat and Sourceforge 5. Making debian packages 6. Making a Windows installer

Statistics Open For All

Statistics, analysis & reporting 8. Open source (AGPL3) norestrictions on commercial use etc 9. Cross-platform

Video (please interrupt with questions) 10. Website

Appearances matter 11. Quick taste of what SOFA is andwhy they might want it 12. Easy to download

Tree-based for each dimension 15. Created an artificial limit of 5000 cells 16. Scales linearly and Python not the bottleneck

Import from Excel and SPSS etc 18. Looking at Statlib for basic statistical tests 19. Want to choose a library for charting 20. Want to add own interactive visualisations for explainingt-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

50% coding script-based solutions 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 28. Why?

Complete control over the tools I rely on as an analyst 29. Open source is a positive contribution 30. Nice to have a large, long-term projectto keep refining

Python-focused 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-recordmydesktopwhich is very easy

Cross-platform and native widgets

wxPython in Action Great book 38. Mailing list (with Robin Dunn a very regularcontributor) 39. Lots of online documentation (but can be a little bit terse) 40. There is a GUI for making GUIs but I prefer handcoding

Clean 41. Can make GUI plugins e.g. SOFA database configuration

Lots of sophisticated, configurable widgets

Was able to make a data entry table work like I thought it should e.g. new row has column label of , behaviour when tabbing

Focus on grid control

When linking to data need to subclass wx.grid.PyGridTableBase 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

When creating a custom control e.g. a composite control, need to subclass wx.PyControl 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

Need to be able to cope with enormous tables as large as MySQL etc can throw at us 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

Option of label display e.g. Male not 1 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?

Not either/or can still have project releases in Sourceforge as well plus a Freshmeat project 64. Why Launchpad?

Ubuntu and Canonical good fit for me (my main platform) 65. Uses modern distributed version control software (Bazaar) 66. Lots of developer resources and ongoing development 67. Corporate backing a safe bet

Modern distributed version control 69. Built in Python 70. Documentation seemed pitched at my level 71. Very simple commands

bzr add importer.py 72. bzr commit -m Added ability to import from Excel 73. bzr push

Can grow with the project 74. Uses modern Ubuntu notifications

Putting the open into open source 76. Also written in Python 77. A web viewer for bazaar projects

Initially very daunted could I even do this? 79. Found ShowMeDo video by Austrian Horst Jens

His example was a Python project so very similar requirements 80. Ended up with very detailed step-by-step guidelines for packaging SOFA Statistics

Have small handful of files with content I reuse for each package e.g. rules 81. Using AGPL so needed to editcopyright file by hand

rules is mainly for shifting files into destination 83. NB installing application for all users, not a given user

Files are put into /usr/share/pyshared/sofa/... 84. Any files needed by an individual user are transferred during first use of application /home/username/sofa/...

control is for versioning, developer details, and dependencies e.g. Depends: python (>=2.6.2-0ubuntu1), wx-common (>=2.8.9.2-2), 85. distro-specific so may not be a simplematter of using alien to make rpms

Nullsoft Scriptable Install System.Free. Used by Firefox, OpenOffice etc 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 inDocuments and Settingsusernamesofa...

Running a new project can be exciting 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 statistics - developing, packaging, & promoting a python open source project

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