Comments on: Must Have Python Packages

By: Raj

Raj — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:41:17 +0000

How about sage:

Thanks,
Raj

By: lorg

lorg — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:56:35 +0000

I was actually reminded of another module that should rightfully be on this list, but I don’t use nearly enough as I should: pylint.

By: lorg

lorg — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:54:59 +0000

Matt:
Thanks! Regarding ProtoBuf, I never used it, so I can’t really say if it belongs on this list.

mtd:
Actually, I know about cheetah (but didn’t use it myself). I didn’t put it in because:
1. It’s mostly specific to web development.
2. Even in web development, I’m not really sure it would be my template engine of choice. Right now there are plenty of template engines, (kid, genshi, Django’s to name a few), so I didn’t think it right to put it in.
3. For other common uses I usually just hack something simple using Python’s built-in capabilities. For example, I once wrote a preprocessor for some language.
4. For code generation I had a bit of a good experience with cog.

By: mtd

mtd — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:30:19 +0000

You missed cheetah http://www.cheetahtemplate.org/, powerful template engine.

By: matt

matt — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 16:28:46 +0000

Hi,

I read you blog and always like what you write

I found the other day ProtoBuf Google’s data serializer which has a python interface. It might belong on the list.

best,
matt

By: lorg

lorg — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 09:07:54 +0000

Heikki:
I actually didn’t yet use virtualenv, and I didn’t use setuptools for my own modules. When I did need to distribute something “properly”, I just used distutils. I still have easy_install around though, but I consider it an installation tool rather than a programming tool.

eliben:
Originally before I wrote this post, my intention was to build such a meta-package. However, except for an organization to do it internally, it probably won’t be worth the effort. First, because you’ll have to construct different meta-packages for each platform (Linux, Windows 32, Windows 64, etc, also for different Python versions). Then, you’ll have to keep updating it, probably at least once a month, whenever one module changes.
However, the list serves almost the same purpose, works just fine, and will probably continue working for months.

By: eliben

eliben — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 07:03:21 +0000

Nice list. I thought of making one of my own, and this serves as a nice reference, because lots of the modules are common. A small difference is that I like the PyCrust shell that comes with wxPython more than IPython, and that I find wxPython essential since I develop GUIs from time to time.

It would be great if someone would package all these together into a mega-package, especially for PCs that are not connected to the net for one reason or another.

By: Heikki Toivonen

Heikki Toivonen — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 20:53:25 +0000

I think that list is too long, there were a couple I hadn’t even heard of. My list would simply include:

* setuptools
* virtualenv
* ipython

Nose and coverage would probably be good general purpose things to add to that list.