How to Contribute Python Software

You've written some cool Python module or application, and you'd like to make it available to the wider Python community. How do you go about doing this? Below are some general guidelines on what you should do to package, register, and announce your software.

If you wish to contribute a patch or improvement to Python, you should consult the Python Developer's Guide.

• Create your distribution. Do yourself a favor, and check out the distutils package for building and installing your software.
• Make your package available. Next, you need to make your package available on the net some where. The best thing to do is to put your package on your own Web or FTP site. If you don't have such a site readily available, you might consider getting one of those free Web accounts that seem to be all over the place these days. Any of these should be adequate for disseminating small Python packages.
• Register your package. Once your stuff is available on the net, you'll want to register it with the Python Package Index. We'd like to see the Package Index become the central registry of all Python contributed software, so you should definitely register your software there.
• Make an announcement. Finally, you'll want to announce your software to the Python world! The best way to do this is to send an email to python-announce at python dot org describing your software. See below for posting guidelines. You might also want to post the same announcement to the general Python list python-list at python dot org (mirrored as the Usenet newsgroup comp.lang.python).
• Wait for feedback.

Python-announce mailing list guidelines

Here are the comp.lang.python.announce posting guidelines (A.K.A. the c.l.py.a FAQ). These are posted bi-weekly to the comp.lang.python, comp.lang.python.announce, comp.answers, and news.answers newsgroups. Your announcement will be parsed by automated scripts which update other lists of recent Python news, so failure to follow the guidelines may prevent your announcement from reaching the whole Python community.

Other catalogs

Tim Middleton manages the Vaults of Parnassus: Python Resources, a repository of Python software.

O'Reilly's CodeZoo is a moderated collection of Python software.