Software distribution and
collation guidelines
Intended
primarily as a set of suggested guidelines for contributors to SoniPy
If the potential
components of SoniPy were easily available and simple to put together,
all that would be necessary would be for us to publish a "this works
for us" list and there would be be no need to engage in distribution at
all. We wish that that was the situation, however, our experience
indicates otherwise!
This page outlines
some practical guidelines for SoniPy Module distribution and we welcome
communications from authors, copyright holders and the community of
technically capable individuals wanting to recommend alterations and
inclusions to these guidelines. Please see the contact details on the HOME
page.
Our distribution
guidelines are:
- The software,
must be in the public domain.
- All original
Copyright and Licensing considerations are included with all
distributions, including links to author or author-approved download
sites. See the COPYRIGHT
MATTERS page for more detail.
- If a complete
downloadable software package is available elsewhere, preferably with
no external dependencies, and is easily installed, we restrict
ourselves to providing a "hard link" to the package. By "hard link" we
mean a link to a specific version for a specific operating system
version and platform.
- Documentation,
as for 3 (above). Documentation frequently lags software development
and such lag can be confusing to those not "in the know". Another
source of confusion is documentation which needs to be "interpreted" in
the context of the user's particular instantiation environment. This is
particularly the case for compiled libraries with python interfaces.
Our approach is
to add to or write interpretation guidelines on the existing
documentation wherever possible and distribute it by the means
described below. When this is not possible we may provide alternative
documentation. We continue to search for a documentation process which
better merges Python documentation strings used by PyDoc and which can
be maintained independent of function and module definition. If you
know of a mature solution, please contact us.
- If only parts
of existing material are applicable to python wrapping for
sonification, including our own modules, compiled libraries,
functioning subsets of examples, tests and documentation, we distribute
the applicable parts, together with the original copyright and other
licensing information.
- Stable versions
of this material are to be made available via SoniPy's Sourceforge
Download page.
- Development
versions of all SoniPy distributed material is maintained in a
Subversion (SVN) repository available for download.
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