If you are a developer of an analysis package and would like your package to become affiliated with the sckit-xray project, leave a message on the (???) group requesting affiliated package status. If you are comfortable doing so, you should also create a pull request adding your package to the registry file on the (???). The Astropy coordination commitee and community will then consider your package based on the standards below.
- It should use classes and functions from the scikit-xray package wherever possible and appropriate. This facilitates re-use of code and sharing of resources.
- The package should have documentation that adequately explains the use of the package, at standards comparable to scikit-xray. Additionally, user-facing classes and functions should all have docstrings. We suggest using sphinx, with the numpydoc-like docstring standards used by scikit-xray. but this is not a strict requirement as long as the documentation is of comparable quality.
- The package should make a best-effort to include an easy-to-run test suite that covers its intended functionality. We realize this is not always possible, but when it is, a test suite is a crucial element of stable software and reproducible science.
- The package developer(s) should make an effort to connect with the sckit-xray developer community, including developers from the core scikit-xray package or any related affiliated packages.
- While not a strict requirement, we also provide coding guidelines that will make your code easier to read by members of the community.
- We strongly encourage affiliated packages be compatible with Python 2.7. Tips for how to acheive this are given in the revelant section of the coding guidelines. The recommended route is to use six.
If your package is judged by the coordination committe to meet these standards, it will be added to the affiliated package registry. If the package is not quite at these standards, but working towards them, the package will be given "provisional" status. Provisional packages will be re-evaluated yearly by the coordinating committee, or earlier if the package author requests a review. (You can e-mail a member of the coordination committee to request such a review). In this re-evaluation, the committee will look at progress the package has made over the previous year. If it has been advanced sufficiently to meet the standards above, it will be considered a full affiliated package (no longer provisional). If it has made some progress but is not yet up to the standards, provisional status will be renewed for a year. If no progress seems to be being made, the committee will contact the authors and determine what their plans are to improve the situation. Based on that, the committee may decide to renew the provisional status, or remove the package from the registry.
If you are considering creating a new astronomy package and would like it to be an Astropy affiliated package, we provide a package template to make it much easier to meet these standards. It provides the necessary structure to generate documentation like that used in the astropy package, a ready-to-use testing framework, and a variety of tools that streamline tasks like user configuration, caching downloaded files, or linking C-compiled extensions. More details on this template are available in the usage instructions for the template.