Thanks! Making it easy for people to create their own forks for teaching needs is really the ultimate goal, so I’m glad to hear you’re planning one for JuliaDynamics.
The package selection is admittedly somewhat arbitrary. The core consists of developer-experience tools I use extensively myself (like Revise and Infiltrator — I may add more of these in the future), plus a mix of packages I relied on during my PhD and ones that impressed me at JuliaCon talks. It’s hard to draw a clean line, but the general heuristics I apply when considering a new inclusion are:
- it takes a long time to precompile (so bundling it provides real value),
- adding it doesn’t downgrade existing dependencies via compat bounds, and
- there’s a reasonably sized user base who would want to try it out.
Anyone is welcome to open an issue proposing a new package, and I’ll evaluate it against those criteria. Looking forward to hearing how the JuliaDynamics fork goes!