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] bilderbuchi: One example that I recently encountered was that I stumbled upon GitHub - SciML/GlobalSensitivity.jl: Robust, Fast, and Parallel Global Sensitivity Analysis (GSA) in Julia . It uses the “GSA” in its Readme, which I assumed to stand for “Global Sensitivity Analysis”. Getting…

Thanks for the context! For a a passer-by it’s hard to make an accurate judgement.

[image] bilderbuchi: However, given that Julia and its ecosystem are quite “academic-affiliated” in nature, I suspect the incentives are a little aligned against that – I think it’s easier to get published when creating your own separate package than for “look, I made a series of big PRs against…

[image] lmiq: My feeling is only against name clashes. Ideally I would like that we could prefix package names by organization, as for example using SciML/DifferentialEquations Something like that would allow organizations to gain reputation and give reputation to packages, without introducing…

[image] jlapeyre: Unfortunately, it’s a bit backward. Most of the packages that we’d like in our curated registry are already in the general registry I don’t see why that is a problem. A package can be in multiple registries. More generally, as others have remarked: this is not the first top…

[image] lmiq: Something like that would allow organizations to gain reputation and give reputation to packages, without introducing barriers for new contributors (they already can do that, but less explicitly) [image] mohamed82008: Another suggestion to “solve” the fragmentation issue for…

[image] jlperla: there is no baseline package which works throughout a significant chunk of the ecosystem (outside of notable exceptions What are major areas without a “baseline package”? It would be useful to gather them in one place, I think. I’ve seen graphs and keyed arrays mentioned, an…

I’ve seen graphs and keyed arrays mentioned, anything else? Testing frameworks Tools for building / viewing / linting documentation I suppose there are “baseline” packages somewhat, but there are competitors which are nearly as popular

Sadly, everyone would have a different answer, which is why it is so useful to build out from conquering one domain at a time. @ChrisRackauckas has outlined a lot of them in his SciML docs consolidation - but SciML can’t personally manage writing all of them, just wrapping them and linking to thei…

Fixing Package Fragmentation

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nilshg May 15, 2023, 2:07pm 61

I’ve not seen an official announcement but was told this on Slack, and Sebastian confirmed as much some time ago:

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Fixing Package Fragmentation

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