This is music to my ears, but what is the future of numpy.ma?  I understand that numpy.oldnumeric.ma (the older version written without inheritance) has been deprecated and slated to be removed in 1.9.  I also have seen some attempts to bring ma functionality into the core ndarray object, but those have not been successful as far as I can tell.

In general, what is the future of inheriting from np.ndarray?