How to contribute improvements to packages hosted on Cheeseshop ( pypi ) ?

Question

I've been using zc.buildout more and more and I'm encountering problems with some recipes that I have solutions to.

These packages generally fall into several categories:

1. Package with no obvious links to a project site
2. Package with links to free hosted service like github or google code

Setup #2 is better then #1, but not much better because for both of these situations, I would have to wait for the developer to apply these changes before i can use the updated package buildout.

What I've been doing up to this point is basically forking the package, giving it a different name and uploading it to pypi, but this is creating redundancy and I think only aggravating the problem.

One possible solution, is to use to use a personal server package index where I would upload updated versions of the code until the developer updates he/her package. This is doable, but it adds additional work, that I would prefer to avoid.

Is there a better way to do this?

Thank you

Answer 1

Your "upload my personalized fork" solution sounds like a terrible idea. You should try http://pypi.python.org/pypi/collective.recipe.patch which lets you automatically patch eggs. Try setting up a local PyPi-compatible index. I think you can also point find-links = at a directory (not just a http:// url) containing your personal versions of those "almost good enough" packages. You can also try monkey patching the defective package, or take advantage of the Zope component model to override the necessary bits in a new package. Often the real authors are listed somewhere in the source code of a package, even if they decided not to put their names up on PyPi.

I've been trying to cut down on the number of custom versions of packages I use. Usually I work with customized packages as develop eggs by linking src/some.project to my checkout of that project's code. I don't have to build a new egg or reinstall every time I edit those packages.

A lot of Python packages used in buildouts are hosted in Plone's svn collective. It's relatively easy to get commit access to that repository.