[Bigbang-dev] Thoughts on plans for future releases

[Amelia Andersdotter]

On 2018-07-08 01:26, Nick Doty wrote:
> That sounds to me like a reasonable game plan.
>
> I like the idea of getting more tests in there now in part so that it
> can feel like a more regular practice to add tests whenever we add new
> features.
>
> I like the idea of adding API documentation, but mostly only if we can
> generate that from inline docstrings, as I'm not confident at this
> point that we can keep completely separate documentation pages up to
> date. I recognize we might need a page or two of overview
> documentation that would be separately written, but otherwise I think
> we can just use tools to generate docs and then make a habit of
> keeping the parameter explanations up to date in the code itself.
>
> I'm not at all clear on what would be necessary for the Python 2 -> 3
> migration or what benefits that would bring us, so I hope you can take
> the lead on that Seb, if indeed it's important for future progress.
>

I've already done some migration work because I didn't want to have the
Python2.7 packages installed. Whatever is needed to follow Niels'
wordcount notebook works with v3-packages for me.

best regards,

Amelia

> What do others think? If this makes sense, should we start opening
> issues to track these tasks?
>
> Cheers,
> Nick
>
>> On Jul 3, 2018, at 7:02 AM, Sebastian Benthall <sbenthall at gmail.com
>> <mailto:sbenthall at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> Hello!
>>
>> Feeling fresh from the 0.2.0 release, I'm thinking about how to keep
>> momentum. It was, really shockingly, over three years between the
>> first two releases, and that's really not right. Research [1] has
>> shown that after three releases, a project is much more likely to be
>> a 'success', not getting abandoned.
>>
>> There is also clearly a lot of ways to polish BigBang that are not
>> deeply technical. 
>>  - We made a lot of progress on the notebooks in the last release,
>> but there is still lots more to do. For example, there's no reason
>> why we shouldn't have notebooks demonstrating how to answer each of
>> Corinne's questions from her recent thread. 
>>  - There's also lots we could do to improve documentation. We should
>> be publishing the API docs to a website like https://readthedocs.org/
>>  - We have a few automated tests, but not thorough test coverage. We
>> could improve that.
>>
>> I propose we make this kind of polishing work the goal of the next,
>> /0.2.1/ release. This would be a small patch release on the existing
>> one, with no major functional changes.
>>
>> A reason why I'm proposing this is that in my mind, the most urgent
>> big update needed to BigBang is conversion from Python 2 to Python 3.
>> That will involve a lot of tweaks across the entire system. Automated
>> test coverage and good documentation of the existing functionality is
>> important to make sure we don't lose quality and introduce new bugs
>> when making that upgrade.
>>
>> What say you?
>>
>> Thanks for reading,
>> Seb
>>
>> [1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/internet-success
>
>
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-- 
Amelia Andersdotter
Technical Consultant, Digital Programme

ARTICLE19
www.article19.org

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