merge with scikit-spectra

[KOLANICH]

https://github.com/hugadams/scikit-spectra

but it seems to be abandoned (you may want to become a new maintainer). It may make sense to merge some pieces of your code into it and then retire rampy.

[charlesll]

Interesting, thanks for the link. I will look into this and see if there is an interest to merge rampy into scikit-spectra.

[Snijderfrey]

Has anything happended in the meantime with this issue? Sounds interesting to me, although probably a lot of work.

[charlesll]

Nothing really happened. It is indeed interesting, but yes it may require a fair amount of work.

I also did not push in this direction at the moment because there is a critical difference in philosophy between scikit-spectra and rampy. Indeed, scikit-spectra is a bit like chemospec in R and aimed at providing a fully-featured object-oriented environment while rampy provides functions to ease your work with the normal python sci-stack, i.e. scipy+numpy+pandas+matplotlib+scikit-learn. For instance, I don't want to provide a plot functionality in rampy, this is done very well by matplotlib and I don't see the point in redoing it and confusing people...

Now, scikit-learn and rampy actually follow the same philosophy, so maybe we could ask to just rename rampy in scikit-spectra? However, renaming a repo is always risky, rampy starts to have a number of stars similar to scikit-spectra, so is it really important to do it? This is open to discussion...

[KOLANICH]

IMHO renaming is needed only if rampy provided replacement for all the features in scikit-spectra.

[Snijderfrey]

I get the point with the different philosophies, and I agree with your aproach. It also makes it quite easy to dive into the code without ever having seen it.

It is nice that rampy is known to some people already. The name however does not really stand out of the mass of repositories here on github, and is not really descriptive of what rampy can do. The short summary additionally given helps of course, and I found it by looking specifically for code which can help me with Raman spectra analysis - so it can be found. However - maybe it is because I do not have that much experience with different python packages - a name starting with scikit catches my eye and I most likely will have a look at it. Therefore, I indeed first looked at scikit-spectra and was disappointed that it is not maintained any more. Only then did I look for alternatives.

From my point of view it is a discussion about the name itself more than about merging the two repositories. And then an eye-catcher as a name might make rampy more "famous" (In this sense it would not have to be scikit-spectra, could be scikit-spectroscopy or something else). It is of course also possible to stick to the old name and focus on the functionality, a perfectly valid approach, too. This way you probably would keep it also more low-key as far as the effort of maintainance is concerned.

What is unclear to me: If rampy was renamed to scikit-spectra, there would be some ambiguity because the old scikit-spectra would still be out there, would it not? This would not be a good situation, too confusing.