Special Interest Group (SIG) Reports

We're not trying to come up with a standard for GUI
What we want is a GUI tool that can have a goal of a broad availablity to a large subset of the Python audience
Formed the GUI SIG as a forum to discuss this
Meet Thursday to continue the debate and have the "bake off"

Problem: people can only find python software by connecting to Python.org and surfing for information randomly.
Goal: Make software easier to find
Added the search engine on the home page
Looking for ideas and support
Will a centralized software registry work for people?
Most attendees agreed they would use a s/w registry if it were available.
Firewalls could be a problem to using such a tool
Looking for things that Guido does *not* have to do
Idea from last time (quite ambitious) run harvest indexer through all the modules indexing doc strings.
Nice idea but most folks will not conform to writing doc strings...
This group is *not* the documentation SIG, the goal is to find software
We need a small set of standards for a bare bones indexing mechanism.
After software, we need a service to locate people with python expirtise

Problem: lots of matrix and other computational fortran code out there - would be nice to interface this via python
Jim Fultun presented a tool at the last workshop that provided a standard interface to matrix code written in fortran.
goal of the sig is to standardize on one method
Current status - the interface works
Also implemented a *complex* number object
in another month it should be ready for review by Guido for possible inclusion in python
very fast!

If you don't standardize the format for which the information is submitted, it's very tough to automate anything
Charter: create a forum for document form and content
Model our project after the linux documentation project
Format options - postscript, HTML, info , troff, pyc files?
Subject Matter - Python core, extention modules, applications, applets
PSA stamp of approval as an incentive

This SIG is new
Goal: To produce a set of tools for use in developing python software
readline, python-mode (emacs), environment browsers, documentation, standards for documentation, and of course the core interpreter
More during tommorrows session

Mostly a forum for submitting bugs
Mark has most of the postings
More during the PythonWin tutorial
thus far Mark's been conservative with postings on the Microsoft software news groups for fear of being swamped