Community effort: Project templates ("cookiecutters") for Sage projects

[Matthias Koeppe]

A few years back, there were efforts to support the creation of pip-installable user packages by preparing project templates that provide some common infrastructure for building and testing etc.

- https://github.com/sagemath/sage_sample

- Marc Masdeu's https://github.com/mmasdeu/sage_package_template

(See a 2020 sage-devel discussion: https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/jOD5QaGAfHs/m/tTqsCFZJAwAJ)

Both templates appear to have fallen out of maintenance (in particular they do not reflect the current practices in Python packaging). More recently we have taken to recommending that people should just imitate what well-maintained existing projects are doing.

One of the weaknesses of using templating mechanisms: Creating a project once is fine, but updating it afterwards is manual work.

Recently I have come across a tool that promises to fix this weakness: https://cruft.github.io/cruft/

It is compatible with the popular "cookiecutter" package and appears to work well.

In https://github.com/sagemath/sage/pull/37541 I have the beginnings of templates for several types of Sage-related projects, using cookiecutter and cruft.

I would suggest a new community effort to develop these templates, to update existing project and to stimulate the development of a package ecosystem downstream of the Sage library.