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…

[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.

I have experience both in choosing to work together and in preferring to not work together. Perhaps sharing my experience can help shed light on some ways forward. For the former, let’s take GitHub - gdalle/ImplicitDifferentiation.jl: Automatic differentiation of implicit functions and GitHub - Thu…

[image] mohamed82008: The second example is GitHub - JuliaNonconvex/Nonconvex.jl: Toolbox for non-convex constrained optimization. vs GitHub - SciML/Optimization.jl: Mathematical Optimization in Julia. Local, global, gradient-based and derivative-free. Linear, Quadratic, Convex, Mixed-Integer, a…

[image] ChrisRackauckas: I think in general that’s fine, but I also think that in practice people don’t really understand the effort and patience required to maintain a package over years. I do see some packages that are nice small personal projects that I’m like “please put this in an org so it…

[image] ParadaCarleton: a pretty flippant response My response was flippant, because I consider the proposal (especially the part about forcing merges, or making it more difficult to create new packages) absurd. But I should have explained that in detail, instead of resorting to sarcasm. I w…

Fixing Package Fragmentation

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jar1 May 13, 2023, 1:57am 34

I wish these two forks could be merged back into one, but I don’t have any ideas for how to make it actually happen.

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Fixing Package Fragmentation

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