As you may be aware, I released a Django application, RPC4Django, publicly a little while ago. This is what I learned.

Make It Easy

You efforts should be targeted at making adoption of your software as easy as possible. When developers look for a package that accomplishes a goal, they aren’t going to spend much time looking at any individual package. Usually a quick google search or a search in pypi and then they might spend a few minutes glancing at a package before moving on to the next one. There are a couple keys to making it easy:

• Have easy documentation on installation, configuration and the license.
  This should be on both your webpage as well as on pypi. More on this later.
• Give demo code or better yet, an actual demo.
  Quite often the one sentence summary on pypi (if you don’t provide a long description) is not sufficient to tell people why they should use your package.
• List the package’s compatiblity.
  Considering very few packages are compatible between 2.5 and 3.0 or even 2.3 and 2.5, I’m very surprised by this. Nothing is more frustrating than thinking you’ve found what you need just to have installation (or worse, execution) fail.

Test Early and Test Often

When I released RPC4Django, it had a reasonable, but not great, unit tests with it. With the future releases, those improved significantly and a few more bugs were caught. Being able to quickly test python 2.4, 2.5 and 2.6 by having a fully built unit test suite was awesome. However, unit tests don’t catch everything. One bug that I did not catch for a while was a bug relating to how Django worked with mod_wsgi on Apache. No amount of unit testing or Django views testing (which is sort of a hybrid of unit and integration testing) would have caught this. It only got caught when the code was pushed to a production server.

Documentation Conundrums

Documentation usually requires keeping data in a number of places. Any project of considerable size has READMEs, a license file, HTML documentation, tutorials, a setup.py long description, class and module documentation, and more. There should be as few authoritative places for package information as possible. In the first version of RPC4Django, I rolled my own HTML documentation and and README basically told the user to read the real documentation. This solved the whole problem of duplicated documentation, but in a rather unenlightened way.

After reading more exhaustively about reST and looking at how other packages solve this problem, I found a better way. With reST, it is possible to include other documents like so:

What this allows for and what RPC4Django does now is to enable one document to be built of many documents. In this way, I keep the license in one file, the installation in another, the changelog in another and they all are included into my README which can be used to generate my HTML documentation.

If my project was even larger, I might do what both the Python project and the Django project do. They include reST documents in their source tree. These include walkthroughs, tutorials, introductions to classes and more. Sphinx, a python package built to document the python library itself, can create attractive documentation hierarchies directly from simple text documents (which are themselves human readable!). Python uses it for all of their documentation and the Django project uses it for basically the entire documentation section of their webpage — including tutorials. You wouldn’t know it since the pages are pretty attractive but they appear to be generated directly out of subversion on a nightly basis. This keeps all the documentation together and makes sure your website, HTML documentation and source documentation stay in sync.

Don’t Get Discouraged

Just because your package is now on pypi doesn’t mean people are going to flock to it and download it. I think I’ve put together a pretty solid and useful package but I have only a few downloaders and I haven’t gotten much feedback. I intend to power through and start a new project.