List astropy coordinated affiliated packages on main documentation page

[adrn]

As per discussion at astropy winter meeting 2018, we should add a list of the astropy-coordinated affiliated packages to the main docs page.

[pllim]

How about a webring? 🤔

[bsipocz]

this is more like an issue for the astropy website, isn't it?

[mhvk]

Looking at the main page, it is not obvious how to do this. However, an easy change would be to move the astropy-coordinates packages to a separate section on the affiliated package page, and then change the lead sentence from

The Astropy Project is a community effort to develop a common core package
for Astronomy in Python and foster an ecosystem of interoperable astronomy packages.

to

The Astropy Project is a community effort to develop a common core package
 for Astronomy in Python and foster an ecosystem of interoperable astronomy packages,
both within and outside of the project.

(with links, of course).

p.s. It is really for the web site, but the advantage of raising the issue here is that more people will see it... Though I guess one could pass things by astropy-dev as well.

[pllim]

@bsipocz , maybe the desire is to move that info from Astropy website to the docs here? @adrn , can you please clarify? Thanks.

[adrn]

We had a discussion about improving visibility of the astropy-coordinated affiliated packages (e.g., reproject). My understanding of the conclusion from that discussion was that we should add, e.g., a new section to the main index.rst called "Astropy-coordinated affiliated packages" with links to: reproject, astroplan, regions, astroquery, specutils, ccdproc, photutils and a link to astropy.org/affiliated. That's all I meant! This just a way to improve cross-referencing concepts and to hack Google.

[adrn]

And @bsipocz - no, I don't mean the main website. I mean the documentation!

[mhvk]

Ah, yes, that is a good idea. Indeed, just a few days ago I tried to find a link to the affiliated packages on the main docs page...

[bsipocz]

just last year at the the coordination meeting we started to move away from duplicating information between docs.astropy.org that points to the docs of the core package and astropy.org that's the landing page of the package. I'm worried that with this we're moving back to the previous setup. (That being said, my interpretation of the discussion that seeded this issue was more about linking to the relevant coordinated package from wherever it's relevant, e.g. link to astroplan from appropriate coordinate pages, to reproject from parts of the visualization/wcs pages)

[pllim]

👎 on duplication as well. High risk of them being out of sync and add to even more confusion. If you move that info to the docs here, you will change the affiliated webpage to link to the docs?

[adrn]

From my perspective, the coordinated affiliated packages don't change on a timescale that we need to worry about duplication and it is far more important to increase visibility. All I'm suggesting is a list of links on the main docs page - no other changes.

[adrn]

(BTW: I'm not saying we can't do more to improve visibility, but the suggestion is minimal in scope to make it easy to implement!)

[astrofrog]

I agree with @adrn that we are not adding/removing coordinated packages fast enough to be worried about duplication.

[pllim]

Okie dokie then. At least make it clear in the dev doc that if one add a package to website, one should also list it on the page here, and vice versa.

[bsipocz]

I just point back to last year's meeting when we decided to do the exact opposite and remove the affiliated package related pages from core as well as put the contributing docs in one place as it was said to be confusing to have it at multiple location. @kelle?

(I'm not worried about the out of sync stuff, the page could even get the data from the same json file for both location, I really just want to avoid this yearly back and forth of restructuring).

[olebole]

One (completely?) other and specific aspect to improve visibility: In Debian (and maybe in Fedora as well) one could add the coordinated packages to the list of packages "suggested" by astropy, which would bring them up in the install program (apt, or a graphical installer). For this, it would be nice if the astropy CHANGES.rst could have an entry "added pyvo to the list of coordinated packages", or if it would at least reflected by an attribute in affiliated.json. This would somehow allow to (manually) update the suggestions. Or any other way to trigger me (and maybe other packagers).

[bsipocz]

I totally support adding an attribute in affiliated.json, maybe even keep a separate changelog for the website or such to add notes for changes in the affiliated/coordinated list, but still feel it doesn't belong to the core package docs or changelog.