Dashes in repository names propagate into package name

[LourensVeen]

If you have a dash in your repository name (e.g. 'python-template' :)), then the Python package will also have a dash in its name, which is invalid Python. Is there any way of converting dashes to underscores here?

[LourensVeen]

Actually, also in the tests, setup.py, setup.cfg, docs/conf.py, maybe docs/index.rst and docs/make.bat.

Maybe we should ask for the name of the GitHub repo and the package name separately? Or ask for the package name first and then give the option of choosing a different repo name?

[LourensVeen]

Hmm, this is tricky. In docs/conf.py, I'd prefer to have the repo name in most places, except in run_apidoc(), because there the package name is needed.

For reference, my repo is github.com/multiscale/ymmsl-python, and the package is named ymmsl. I don't think that that is that uncommon to have.

[bouweandela]

Usually the names of packages (as used on PyPI, with pip, etc, e.g. pip install my-package) use dashes, while the corresponding package that you use in Python (import my_package) uses underscores.

[LourensVeen]

Well, yes, that's the even more common case. But import ymmsl_python is also a bit silly. You're not going to import the Java library :). On the other hand, I'd like to have python in the repository name so that it's clear for which language this library is.

[bouweandela]

How about choosing pymmsl? ;-)

[LourensVeen]

Well, that y is for YAML, because there's also a gMMSL (which defines how to draw things as diagrams). So it'd have to be pyymmsl, which definitely requires a hyphen for readability, so we get py-ymmsl. Which would be a problem, since you can't have hyphens in Python package names...

[jvdzwaan]

I agree that more names are better, but I'm not sure how confusing it would be for people who don't have a lot of Python experience.

[LourensVeen]

I remember being confused by this when I started programming in Python, so yes, it may be. But that could be fixed with a good default, so if you have a dash in your repository name, it'll ask for the package name but suggest the repo name with the dash replaced with an underscore.

To me at least that would signal that dashes are not allowed and underscores canonical.

[jvdzwaan]

The problem is that cookiecutter does not support conditional variables. You can provide default values, and use values (with or without string replacements from other variables). That helps a little. But if we change this, there will always be three questions:

1. project name
2. repository name
3. package name

We can put an explanation in the documentation, but who is going to read it :)

[LourensVeen]

Well, my original suggestion was to autoconvert. A dash in a Python package name is anyway illegal, so converting there should be uncontroversial. Maybe it's not exactly what the user wanted, but at least it'll work. A safe change could be to convert to underscores only in places where not doing so would break the generated project. Then at least we're not making things worse.

[jvdzwaan]

This may be helpful: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3303312/how-do-i-convert-a-string-to-a-valid-variable-name-in-python

[jvdzwaan]

Apparently, I already worked on fixing this: 28b9779, at least partially...

[jvdzwaan]

Not sure I addressed all cases, but closing this issue for now.

Feel free to reopen if you run into trouble with this again...