How to manage this package?

[sfarrens]

During a maintainers meeting (26/10/2020) @sfarrens, @EiffL, @martinkilbinger and @santiagocasas discussed the current content and scope of the package.

Current Status

• src directory contains C++ and IDL code. IDL code is not currently maintained. C++ code set up to build via CMake using Sparse2D backend. Additional C++ code can easily be added with current set-up.
  • Not much new C++ code expected to be developed, so only really useful for preserving older codes
• pycs directory contains Python code. At present this has been taken from multiple sources and some redundancy likely exists.
  • Plenty of work needed to clean up the code already included
  • Alternatively can start building this from scratch

Discussion

• Should everything be centralised into a single package?

  • This will be difficult to maintain without proper Git practices (pull requests, etc.)
  • Not 100% obvious who benefits from this
  • May be difficult to motivate people to contribute without clear objectives

• Should we instead have a several more focused packages (e.g. lenspack, something for theory, something for signal processing)

  • If so, how many packages?
  • Individually easier to maintain
  • Easier to have targeted focus
  • We can easily create a unified environment for separate packages

• Should we consider contributing tools to bigger open source packages (e.g. AstroPy)

  • Significant work to meet standards
  • No package maintenance

• What should the package name be?

  • Several places in the repo have different names (cosmostat, pycs, python-cs)
  • One name should be consistently used