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[pygame] Growing Pygame



I have a proposal.

Let's build a pygame-contrib package, which is distributed with the
pygame installers. The package contains contributed tools and
utilities, which might be candidates for the pygame distribution.

Why?

1) Lots of pygame development is happening, lots of people want to
share their work, but it is usually not immediately accessible and
usually slips under most peoples radars. Pygame has not grown much in
the last few years, even though people do see to want more. See this
post from 2003.
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/pygame-users/1699668

Not a whole lot has happened since.

2) It will help build better games faster. I'm reinventing the wheel
all the time, (its a bad bad bad habit) however, I always use
officially blessed tools rather than my own. Having an officially
blessed set of tools will help lots of people make easier decisions
about what to use. A tool from the contrib module would become blessed
when it moves into the pygame namespace.

3) It would be _great_ for pyweek and other competitions. It would
also make pygame more attractive to educators.

How?

A pygame contrib trunk could be created which is expected to work with
the pygame svn head. When pygame is branched/tagged for release, so is
pygame-contrib.

Barriers to entry for coders should be minimal. Eg. Plain ascii
docstrings, tests using the unittest module and new style classes
should be enough to get a piece of code considered for inclusion in
pygame-contrib. The pygame-contrib maintainer(s) would vet submissions
for correctness, consistency and usefulness. Once a piece of code
proves its usefulness for general pygame development, it would be
considered for inclusion into the pygame namespace by the pygame
maintainer(s).

So, who is with me? :) If the pygame maintenance crew thinks this is a
good idea, I have an implementation plan ready for discussion.
Otherwise, I'll just keep reinventing my wheels :)


-Simon Wittber