Developing a package

In this section, I'm going to look at some aspects of package development.

These comprise the various approaches you may adopt to write a package, the procedures to adopt when you want to upload and maintain it via Git as part of a registered Julia module.

I'll conclude by looking at how this strategy might be applied to the case of handling NetPBM images and sketch out the embryonic package, the full source is available in the code downloads accompanying this book.

Anatomy

A minimal package, to be saved to GitHub, should consist of a README.md markdown file and the src and test folders. The src folder contains all the code and the test folder has one or more test scripts that can be used to check the functionality of the package.

In Julia, the package name is normally chosen in the form of MyMod.jl (for example) and there should be a file in the src folder also called MyMod.jl. This is the main module and may reference other modules (that is, use these modules) or include...