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Signs That Your Python Package is Not Usable By Others

Here's a challenge to web framework implementors: start packaging and documenting things in a way all Python web programmers would be embarrassed to not understand.

Signs that your framework packages are not optimally consumable by the Python web development community:

  • Your package has no API: the implementation is the API.
  • Your package is never released independently from some other set of packages. Variation: you never think about making a big deal out of releasing just one of your packages, but releasing all of them at once in lockstep with each other is a major event.
  • Usefulness of your package depends on someone subclassing one of your classes to do anything at all.
  • Installing your package properly requires that you use a build system that not everyone runs
  • Installing your package relies on more than five other packages as dependencies.
  • Your package is documented using a set of files in the package itself, but nowhere else (no website docs). Variation: your package is only documented within "rollup" documentation for an application or framework that uses it.
  • Your package is a plugin to a framework that you use, but it doesn't work outside the framework even though it solves a more general problem shared by other frameworks.
  • Your package solves problems using formalizations of concepts that they don't want to understand (adapters, interfaces). Use of your package requires that people understand the concepts.
  • Your package has been out for years but it's only used in your framework.

Mea culpa. Youa culpa too, I'm sure. ;-)

Created by chrism
Last modified 2008-04-08 12:37 PM