Our proposal
Rationale: Python is an increasingly important programming language in science and education. A large part of its appeal is the wide array of 3rd-party open source packages available for Python that make it a significant player in science, education, linguistics, and the humanities (c.f. SciPy/NumPy, NLTK, OLPC, archaeo-FOSS, etc.)
However, many of the available 3rd-party packages do not work well on platforms other than Linux, and often binary builds and installers are simply not available for a particular platform.
We are soliciting Mellon funds for the Buildhaus project to make use of Snakebite. Snakebite (www.snakebite.org) provides a home
(software, hardware, documentation) as well as a community for building Open Source Python software under various configurations.
We hope to use Mellon funds to support the following three projects at Michigan State on the Snakebite platform.
1. Michigan State undergraduates will systematically build, test and release Open Source Python packages on Windows, Mac OS X, and a wide array of other UNIX architectures and operating systems (see snakebite.org for list).
2. Michigan State will provide Python community developer support in the form of machine access, software support, and process support, as well as "help desk" workers.
3. Michigan State undergraduates, together with faculty and participating Open Source/community developers, will create a set of
best practices and process documentation to help the community address cross-platform compatibility issues. We will also build tools to extend the impact of this effort beyond Michigan State by providing longer-lasting developer resources, e.g. tools to auto-build Python eggs and installers across multiple platforms.
We are in the "startup throes" of such a program here at Michigan State already with support from Snakebite Inc., Michigan State
Computer Science & Engineering (CSE), and Dr. Brown's lab. Mellon funds would help us jumpstart this program by leveraging the equipment and software contributions we've already received and encouraging (and then supporting) further contributions. (Basically, we have a very hard time finding funds to pay undergraduates, who are much happier doing software development than flipping burgers, but must go with the paying job.)
The Python Buildhaus initiative also dovetails well with the CSE department's recent adoption of Python as the intro programming
language for the CSE program. We are currently training all CSE majors and many other MSU undergrads in Python for their first
programming language, and we are increasing placing an emphasis on using Python to build cross-platform tools in our upper-division courses (e.g. Web development, PyCUDA GPUs for genetic algorithms).
Personnel bios:
Dr. C. Titus Brown is a new assistant professor in Computer Science and Microbiology/Molecular Genetics at MSU, where he teaches Python and open source software development to undergraduates. He is also a member of the Python Software Foundation. He is the author of a number of open source software packages for both software testing and bioinformatics. Dr. Brown has been the backup administrator for the Python Software Foundation's Google Summer of Code program since 2006, and he also ran the Google Highly Open Participation program for the PSF in 2007. He is a co-founder of Snakebite, Inc. and the director of Snakebite's MSU component.
Trent Nelson is a technology consultant and a CPython committer who contributes to testing and improving CPython on Windows. He is also the founder of Snakebite, Inc.
Dr. Bill Punch is the director of the High Performance Compute Center at MSU. He co-teaches the intro programming course at MSU where he introduces 200+ undergraduates to Python each term.
Contingent support
The Python Software Foundation has endorsed this proposal and will provide support for participating undergraduates to attend PyCon.
The Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University has endorsed this proposal and will provide space for participating undergraduates, in addition to existing contributions (space, server hosting, and administrative help).
Additional support
Microsoft and HP have donated significant software and hardware resources to the Snakebite project.
Snakebite, Inc. fully endorses this project.