github, ReadTheDocs & the kindness of strangers

Three times, within the space of a few weeks, I’ve had complete strangers drop me an email to tell me that they’ve been making fruitful use of some module of mine and that they’ve got it to work on Python3. They’ve either attached an updated version or indicated what would need to happen.

Spurred on by this, I got my act together and shifted a bunch of my code over to github where it is a little more public and where it’s easier for others to contribute. I’ve also made moves to incorporate the changes & patches supplied. At the same time I’ve done a bit of tidying up around the projects and have made use of the wonderful readthedocs.org.

There’s still work to do, but now winshell — one of those tiny helps-you-a-bit modules I wrote eight years ago and which remains basically unchanged — has just seen a 0.4.1 release which has docs and tests and which runs against everything between Python 2.4 and 3.2 (and possibly more besides). The code is hosted at github, the docs are hosted at readthedocs.org and it’s available on PyPI and pip-installable. Thanks to Steve Peck and Roman Luks for patches & suggestions.

My software development tends to go in bursts when the available time, energy & motivation coincide, so lets hope that I can keep this particular ball rolling. My active_directory module is also available on github and has a py3k branch kindly supplied by Ken Gillett. The complication there is that it’s (naturally) against the last released version, which is a few versions behind my private version. If you’re interested, you can fetch it from the py3k branch. My aim is to re-apply the coresponding diffs from the main branch and then look at merging or splitting or something.

I mean to write an entry on the requirement tensions between github, PyPI, pip and the various recommended practices, especially with respect to the README files, but that’ll have to wait for another moment.