On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 4:42 PM, Eli Stevens (Gmail) <wickedgrey@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 10:00 AM, Eli Stevens (Gmail)
<wickedgrey@gmail.com> wrote:
> Can anyone please give me some suggestions on how to go about writing
> a unit test for this?  Or should I just submit a pull request?

I've gotten a bit of positive feedback to adding the 'e' type to the
struct module on the python-ideas list (per my understanding, not
before python 3.3, but I don't think that should hinder adoption in
other libraries), so I'd like to ask again about unit testing a change
like this.  Can anyone offer some advice for where to start?

The tests for the buffer protocol are in numpy/core/tests/test_multiarray.py, starting at line 1847. It does some round-trip testing of all the types through the memoryview object.

You'll also need to change the _dtype_from_pep3118 in numpy/core/_internal.py, called from the _descriptor_from_pep3118_format function, so that NumPy can accept the half type from a buffer as well.

Also, what kind of timeframe / cutoff am I looking at to get this into
1.6.0 or 1.6.x?

Since the changes to NumPy are pretty small, I think it should be ok to get into 1.6.0. How to handle it is up to Ralf, however, and it would probably be best to get it into beta 2 which I believe he would like to release over the weekend (please chime in to correct me).

-Mark