Publicize

The track package has found use inside the BBCF team, and the project can be qualified as relative success. It has been adopted by a few users which have both reported the things that worked, and the ones that didn't. This has given us confidence that 1) the library is actually useful for something and that 2) the most serious and visible bugs have been squashed.

What it needs now is more formats added, as well the careful implementation of the most important features requested in the [enhancement list][enhancement-list].

None the less, we think that the functionality already provided for dealing with genomic formats could interest other people and groups. We should definitively publicize this package. This could help us in several ways. Indeed, growing the community of an open source project is always a ready opportunity to get feedback and constructive criticism. More interestingly, it can also be an opportunity for contributions or the creation of new forks.

To do this we need three things. Firstly, we a version of the track package specifically tailored for the public. The current branch of the project has a dependency on the bbcflib project. Asking users to install additional packages is a real show-stopper and sure way to kill the popularity of a piece of software. Secondly, we should use PyPI for super-easy distribution. Thirdly, we should decide on a few targeted communication channels for our publicity.

Standalone version

To build a version best suited for distribution outside the BBCF and without dependencies we need to:

0. Copy the code that was used in bbcflib library directly in the package.
1. Obviously, then replace all calls the bbcflib library with new calls.
2. Remove methods that are too specific and probably not useful for a general public.
3. Remove the simple sub package, as this has not really been used, even inside the BBCF.
4. These modifications, hence, require a different documentation page. We can just upload this on the forked gh-pages.
5. Once the new documentation is up, links to the old documentation need to be changed.

PyPI

Just upload the package to http://pypi.python.org/pypi and change the installation method in the documentation.

Communication

We could post about it in various places. This would at least trigger some curiosity, I'm sure.

0. Post on Biostar Done.
1. Post on Reddit Done.
2. Post on Seqanswers Done.
3. Adding a link on this python page under the "Life Science" category. Done.