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:

1. The software, must be in the public domain.


2. 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.


3. 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.


4. 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.
   

5. 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.


6. Stable versions of this material are to be made available via SoniPy's Sourceforge Download page.


7. Development versions of all SoniPy distributed material is maintained in a Subversion (SVN) repository available for download.