Recently, we published two Python packages to PyPI: bdrxml and bdrcmodels. No one else is using those packages, as far as I know, and it takes some effort to put them up there, but there are benefits from publishing them.
Putting a package on PyPI makes it easier for other code we package up to depend on bdrxml. For our indexing package, we can switch from this:
‘bdrxml @ https://github.com/Brown-University-Library/bdrxml/archive/v1.0a1.zip#sha1=5802ed82ee80a9627657cbb222fe9c056f73ad2c’,
to this:
‘bdrxml>=1.0’,
in setup.py, which is simpler. This also lets us using Python’s package version checking to not pin bdrxml to just one version, which is helpful when we embed the indexing package in another project that may use a different version of bdrxml.
Publishing these first two packages also gave us experience, which will help if we publish more packages to PyPI.