Taken from a Slack discussion: I’ve had colleagues comment that fragmentation is currently the only really bad thing of the Julia ecosystem. They miss the numpy/scipy monolithic approach. Now for most package ecosystems the bus factor probably follows some kind of power law, but the vibe I get …

This kind of feels like two separate issues: Big packages that are broken up into several small ones with perhaps a top level package re-exporting those methods. Most of the time a single or small team of contributors are maintaining all of these packages. Many packages that are trying to achi…

I’d bet there’s a lot of “import numpy, scipy, matplotlib” types of people out there - I’m one of them. From what I’m seeing SciML is the Julia equivalent of Scipy, at least from a documentation standpoint, and does a pretty good job of consolidating a bunch of packages into one place where they can…

[image] ParadaCarleton: Can we split the conversation about whether consolidation is good into a different thread? I think it’s part and parcel to a discussion on how to “fix” fragmentation, honestly. There are many tacks that can be taken to “fix fragmentation” here. For example: The Gene…

[image] heltonmc: I must admit I particularly don’t like the first approach where I have to look through many sub-packages to see where methods are called I think this is not fully a symptom of monolithicness / fragmentation, but also the fact that many common include and using patterns make …

I agree with the sentiment that there are multiple solutions and problems we really want to tackle here, but the hardest one is probably the one that truly does necessitate consolidation. Personally, the term “consolidation czar” sounds a bit silly but perhaps its underlying meaning is more pragmat…

[image] adienes: [image] heltonmc: I must admit I particularly don’t like the first approach where I have to look through many sub-packages to see where methods are called I think this is not fully a symptom of monolithicness / fragmentation, but also the fact that many common include and…

[image] jules: Maybe the motivation to do this can come from specific “consolidation sessions” at JuliaCon where maintainers of related packages could meet, get to know each other and devise a road map for their particular niche of the ecosystem. This is a really great idea. I am somewhat doi…

Are these going to be broadcasted or have some sort of Zoom link?

[image] tbeason: Instead of having a consolidation czar, we could just as easily have a discoverability czar. People discover them… They just discover either all of them or a random draw from them, and most are uncomplete and poorly maintained. Consolidation isn’t required, just a signal tha…

[image] Formatting or Format? General Usage Format.jl isn’t totally compatible with Formatting.jl, the biggest difference is that I incorporated the PR that Tom Breloff (great guy that he is, of Plots.jl fame) had done, and renamed some of the functions as I saw fit (i.e. …

These are the sort of decisions I absolutely hate working on. It’s mostly bike-shedding until you reach a reasonable conclusion, then you have to spend the next months-year explaining over and over why they are seeing deprecation warnings and didn’t use the special syntax they would prefer.

Fixing Package Fragmentation

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Fixing Package Fragmentation

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