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
