Create sphinx-gallery-extra + signaling scope of the project

[choldgraf]

There have been a few moments now where it seems like a particular feature would be useful (e.g. allowing for notebook inputs utils as in #423 ) but it's stalled because there's disagreement about adding new dependencies etc.

The idea has been thrown around before for a repository that can be a bit more loose in its restrictiveness. Are people still interested in this?

[GaelVaroquaux]

+1 for creating a sphinx-gallery-extra Note that the lack of reply on some of the interesting proposals that fell in recently is nothing more than a lack of time, rather than a lack of interest. Some of the constraints on requirements could be lifted to some point.

[choldgraf]

I think that a sphinx-gallery-extra could help with lifting some of the harsher restrictions.

Personally I think we should make what is "in-scope" and "out-of-scope" more explicit and clearly-justified so that people know what to expect. In recent months we've had a few people show up with new ideas that seem reasonable, only to be turned away by a casual comment from a team-member, or by negative feedback on a PR that already had a lot of work done on it.

I do worry that the sphinx-gallery community isn't perceived as a welcoming community. In one case, it's already resulted in somebody re-writing all of Sphinx-Gallery in a separate project (again, maybe that was the right thing to do, but I'm not convinced that we allowed for a productive conversation to happen that makes it possible to decide this)

Just a few thoughts worth considering. To be clear, I agree that it's really important for a community to decide what is in/out of scope, I'm just saying this needs to be signaled clearly and collaboratively, justified, and communicated to others in a clear and positive manner.

[maartenbreddels]

Or maybe some API refactoring makes it easier for external projects to reuse some of the code, for instance, reuse the RST generation, but do the execution and thumbnail generation themselves.