Tuesday, December 20, 2005

More Cheesecake bits

Thanks to Michael Bernstein for updating the Index Measurement Ideas Wiki page for the Cheesecake project with some great information regarding standard file naming practices. He cites from ESR's The Art of Unix Programming, namely from Chapter 19 on Open Source:

Here are some standard top-level file names and what they mean. Not every distribution needs all of these.

  • README - The roadmap file, to be read first.
  • INSTALL - Configuration, build, and installation instructions.
  • AUTHORS - List of project contributors (GNU convention).
  • NEWS - Recent project news.
  • HISTORY - Project history.
  • CHANGES - Log of significant changes between revisions.
  • COPYING - Project license terms (GNU convention).
  • LICENSE - Project license terms.
  • FAQ - Plain-text Frequently-Asked-Questions document for the project.
Clearly not all these files are required, but this confirms Will Guaraldi's idea of adding points to the Cheesecake index if at least a certain percentage of these (and other similar) files is found.

Another idea I liked from the Good Distribution Practice section of ARTU is to encourage people to provide checksums for their distributions. I'm thinking about including a Cheesecake index for this kind of thing.

On another front, I'm busily changing the layout of the Cheesecake source code as I'm packaging it up as an egg. It's a breeze to work with setuptools, as I'll report in another post. I'll also be adding more unit tests, and BTW it's a blast to run them via the setuptools' setup.py test hook. I'm using the nose collector mechanism to automatically run the unit tests when python setup.py test is invoked (thanks to Titus for enlightening me on this aspect of setuptools.)

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