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guidelines - Multipart package creation, development and maintenance



I am a physics major. I focus on theoretical and mathematical physics. After spending some time with Mathematica I found that it is not straightforward to create separate files for logically distinct computations and then join them together to create a package.


Of course, looking at some of the already available packages bundled with some release of Mathematica and reading some docs, I was able to get a sense of the structure of the package directory that allows Mathematica to parse it correctly (such as a Kernel folder that contains the init.m file for pre-loading external packages/contexts, Documentation folder containing docs for the same, and a PacletInfo.m file for enabling resource distribution as paclet).


However, the following is still not clear to me:



  • How can one write several $.m$ files and connect them appropriately to create a single package?

  • What is the best way to define notations that may be as reliably used as any other built-in notation like that for integral or summation? In theoretical physics, succinct notation is of tremendous benefit in condensing information. I am aware of the Notations package, but I find it really unreliable.


  • How can one implement the package as a paclet and host it online for free distribution?

  • Is there really extensive documentation, with Wolfram style documentation, tutorials, guides and links?

  • How can one make front-end items like palettes, stylesheets suited to the computations the package does?

  • What debugging tools are available for really long code?

  • What options are there for fast and reliable version control like git and integration with Github and the likes?

  • What is the common workflow behind a package creation, development, distribution and maintenance?


There are questions similar to this one already:



This question might fail to be pointed enough for a typical Mathematica SE post but I have tried my best.





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